We are reaping the harvest of betraying Quaid’s vision and the seeds of extremism, ethnicity and sectarian divide, sowed by Zia and its nourishment by Musharraf junta. Instead of Quaid and Iqbal’s modern democratic welfare state, what we have is a country where the constitution and laws are slave to the whims and greed of few. The biggest threat to national security is the failure of state institutions to perform their constitutional tasks.
Irrespective of whether the brutal murder of Hazaras in Machh was instigated by foreign enemies, those responsible and paid to protect lives have failed repeatedly. The brutal killing of a young man Usama Satti in Islamabad by trigger happy men in uniform is an unpardonable crime. How can police and others responsible for law enforcement justify their incapability to stop a mob from damaging a Hindu shrine in Karak?
Images of the cold-blooded murder of a family captured on video near Sahiwal, including a 13year girl still haunts public memory. These cannot be termed as Collateral Damage, nor dismissed as accidents, but plain simple criminal heinous murder. Those who lost lives were human beings, whose lives should matter as much as the lives of the elected or paid elite of this country. Merely calling ourselves an Islamic State is hypocrisy.
Ordinary law-abiding citizens are falling prey to criminals, who manage to kill and get away on one pretext or another. A State that fails to perform its primary responsibility of protecting lives of citizens, is a state that needs to cleanse the mess within its corridors of power and the paid servants of, who have repeatedly failed to perform constitutional obligation to protect lives and property of citizens. All state institutions exist to serve the people, otherwise why should their salaries be funded by tax-payers.
Malik Tariq Ali
Lahore
