The PPP needs to wonder why a case for the murder of Nizam Jokhio was only registered after the family and other protesters had to protest at several places. True, the alleged murderer, Jam Awais, is a party MPA, but the FIR says that he had tried to get some foreign guests to hunt the houbara bustard, an endangered species. Nizam tried to stop them, which allegedly enraged Jam Awais, who summoned him to his farmhouse in Malir, whee he and four others allegedly beat Nizam to death.
It seems that Jam Awais thought his stature as an MPA extended to two criminal acts: the hunting of houbara bustards, and killing someone on his land. It is to be hoped that the government allows a fair investigation and a fair trial to take place, and does not emulate the Balochistan case where an MPA who ran over a traffic policeman, killing him, managed to escape justice. At the very least, whether there is a trial or the victim’s family compounds the offence by accepting blood money, Jam Awais should not be awarded the PPP ticket again, and he should be expelled from the party.
It is not right that, in this third decade of the 21st century, such egregious displays of the Sindhi wadero’s impunity before the law should have any place. These two actions are considered crimes of the worst kind, and thus committing them with impunity has a pleasure of its own: hunting an endangered species and murdering another human being. It is part of the dark side of the Sindhi landowning tradition, though it is not really a Sindhi thing, but applies to a large extent across the entire Indo-Gangetic plain, extending northwards to Punjab and eastwards to Balochistan, and westward to Bengal, crossing both Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. If the PPP professes to be a liberal, progressive party, and to be headed by a ‘woke’ individual like Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, it will not tolerate upholders of this culture in its ranks.
