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WHERE cities are forever smarting under violence and where the grip of the law is loose, it is not unusual for citizens to act as police and judge. With faith as a motive the mix becomes lethal and the protesters turn into a vigilante mob with ready justifications for murder. Mob justice has been witnessed in several places, and lately the vigilantes have appeared in the lawless streets of Karachi and near Quetta. On Sunday, a mob attacked a police station in Karachi, angered by the alleged blasphemous act of a man — reportedly a drug addict — who had been booked and arrested by the law-enforcers. The police managed to disperse the raiders with aerial shooting of bullets and firing teargas shells, even though the situation was tense enough for Rangers to have been called in. Given the prevailing atmosphere, this was an instance where an ugly incident was avoided. A similar angry raid on a police station near Quetta which was holding a blasphemy suspect on Saturday turned more violent. It ended in the death of one protester and caused bullet injuries to no less than 19 men, eight of them policemen.
Such incidents are linked in no small part to the blasphemy laws on our books and the increasing atmosphere of religious intolerance that is crowding out all voices of sanity. Moreover, a judicial system which has failed to deliver has aggravated the general frustrations of a society that has increasingly come to feel that for its grievances to be addressed adequately, it must take the law into its own hands. Rights activists, both in Pakistan and abroad, have time and again questioned the inability of governments in the country to effectively check these violent protests that have a tendency to get out of control and to result in acts of extreme brutality. Quite often, it has been noticed, the law-enforcers fail to fully anticipate the repercussions of holding a blasphemy accused and are late in putting remedial measures in place. While theirs is certainly a sensitive job, they must take all precautions to protect a suspect from the anger of the mob.
