A particularly scary incident has taken place in Dera Ismail Khan, where female teacher of a girls’ madrassah knifed one of their colleagues dead. They did so because she had allegedly committed blasphemy in a dream which was seen by the daughter of one of the murderers. It marks a first in several ways. First, it was the first occasion where a madressa teacher was accused. Second, though it was not the first case where the accuser and the accused were women (the reader may recall the Asia Bibi case, where women were on both sides), it was certainly the first case where the punishment was inflicted by women. However, it is almost certainly the first time that the allegation rests on someone else’s dream. The problem with such evidence is that, even if true, it is not the basis on which an FIR can be registered. A person’s actions in someone else’s dream may be of interest to psycvhologists, but it has not been accepted by any court as evidence.
It is possible that deeper investigation will uncover other, more mundane, motives which led to the fatal assault, but it should be mentioned that this may be the result of a society which has treated blasphemy not as a serious crime and sin, but as an excuse to bring an enemy into trouble. Blasphemy charges laid against members of the minority communities are common, even though the accuser often has some other, more personal, motive. Blasphemy is a scary charge, with policemen not even willing to detain accused, and judges not even willing to conduct trials.
Even though there is a blasphemy law, it is an offence over which people are ready to take justice into their own hands. Indeed, saying that the law needs to be revisited is itself accounted blasphemous, as Punjab Governor Salman Taseer found to his cost in 2011, when he was assassinated in an egregious case of private vengeance. It needs to be considered why such cases keep on recurring. Is there a problem in the way the law is implemented? This new dimension, of dream-accusations merely adds to the dangers faced by, well, everyone.
