FOR the parents the happiness of the ‘valima’ of their daughter turned into a nightmare when their only son, Shahzaib Khan, was so brutally murdered by trigger-happy young waderas and their guards. His killers are at large, enjoying the comforts of their homes in the interior of Sindh.

Even though Shahzaib was the son of a serving DSP, the FIR could only be lodged on the intervention of an MNA related to Shahzaib’s father. Can this be taken as an example of a dysfunctional state where killers can get away so easily?

The functions of the state are evaluated and closely monitored for its misbehaviour towards its own population and the international community. How the international community delineates itself to a stage where the ripples start to grow bigger and then the big bang when they begin to feel that the security risks have reached a point where they could affect the securities of their own countries.

The parliament devises the institutions as they go long and give them an outline and ambit within which they function. These institutions, once intact, form the basis as the systems equally applicable to all the individuals and citizens.

The same institutions are weakened by stakeholders and the intact systems violated, brings a state of anarchy, a state within a state with its own laws leading to the eventual weakening of all the pillars of a government. Only those functionaries of the institutions survive who, once forced, are smart enough to be able to find interpretations favouring the whims and desires of their masters in order to survive.

A collapse can be evaluated by widespread corruption and collapse of regular channels of interaction between the government and state officials and loss of control of the government over the coercive institutions of the state and the laws being openly and repeatedly breached by the rich and the powerful.

The state can only effectively function if it plays within the rules, and once these rules are broken or overruled, the clock starts ticking and gradually the institutions collapse, leading to no system at all.

ABID S. MUSTIKHAN Karachi