HALF listening to a BBC Radio 4 play set in India the other day, I sat up on hearing the main character utter this line: “In India, status is not measured by the size of your car or your house, but by the magnitude of the crime you can commit with impunity.”

It struck me this was even truer of Pakistan. After all, any drug smuggler, pimp or corrupt civil servant can afford a garish but expensive house or car. However, you need serious clout to send off your son to Dubai when he’s been placed on the Exit Control List after committing a murder before witnesses.

The rich and the connected in Pakistan have always enjoyed the kind of immunity from the law that dictators in other countries can only dream of. Forget petty offences like breaking a traffic light: everybody does that without even causing a cop to lift his whistle. Here, everything from tax evasion to stealing electricity can be arranged for anybody who can pay.

Our elites behave in an appalling fashion.

But those with serious status don’t even have to pay for government officials to look the other way. These are the people who use the VIP lounges at the airport, and have minions to clean up the mess they leave in their wake. In Pakistan, your status is also measured by the number of police guards assigned to you. Never mind that in a city like Karachi, there are twice as many private guards as there are cops; you still want your police mobiles clearing the way.

If you have the right connections, your son can cause the accidental death of a fine person like Mustafa Noorani by driving much too fast. All it takes is a few phone calls, and the spoilt brat walks free.

But even those without any apparent clout have a licence to kill with impunity: the other day a pregnant young woman was bludgeoned to death near the Lahore High Court by male members of her immediate family for the terrible crime of choosing her own life partner. The father confessed immediately, and will no doubt soon be released. And why not, considering nobody is ever convicted for the thousands of so-called honour killings that occur every year?

Of course, if you want to kill a member of our oppressed minorities, help yourself as it’s open season on them around the year. Recently, an Ahmadi doctor was gunned down at a cemetery. He’s only the latest in a long succession of Ahmadi murder victims, and again, no arrest has been made. In such cases, what gives the killers immunity is that the police won’t take on our powerful clerics for the sake of second-class citizens who have no political backing.

To get a sense of clerical clout, consider the case of Maulana Abdul Aziz, the cleric who ran Islamabad’s Lal Masjid until 2007. After months of escalating lawlessness, when the government finally intervened, and he was arrested while trying to flee in a burqa, Maulana Abdul Aziz was soon transformed into the victim. The judiciary cleared him of all charges, and is now trying Musharraf for belatedly doing his duty.

In fact, you have immunity if you kill in the name of Islam. Just look at the 50,000-plus Pakistanis who have fallen to jihadi terror. Few have been arrested, leave alone tried and convicted for this slaughter of the innocent. And many of those who were arrested have been freed in spectacular jailbreaks, or released by frightened judges.

Muslims everywhere become enraged if a mosque is deliberately damaged. But it’s OK for jihadis to blow them up, preferably with hundreds of believers praying inside. And it’s fine to desecrate Hindu temples, Sikh gurdwaras and Christian churches.

So why do our pampered elites behave in such an appalling fashion? The short answer is because they can. In the subcontinent, the whole point of attaining power is to place yourself above the law. Here, the feudal has become the role model. Which wadera has ever been tried for murder?

In fact, going back to pre-colonial days, our entire ethos has been shaped by the concept of droit de seigneur, or the medieval ‘right of the lord’, which gave a feudal the right to spend the first night with a vassal’s bride. Anybody with power rides roughshod over those below him in the pecking order.

And if you are a nobody in your village, you can still accuse a Hindu or a Christian of blasphemy. To kick somebody below you is an unfortunate human instinct, if only to show that you still count for something.

irfan.husain@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, May 31st, 2014