Adil Najam
For nearly a week now Pakistan has watched, in stunned horror, yet another episode of vigilante justice. This one unfolding on our television screens in all its gory detail. The savage murder of two young brothers – Mughees and Muneeb – in Sialkot as people, including police, look on has rightly incensed our sensibilities.
The news itself is clearly horrific, horrible, and horrifying. But the newness in the news is that this time people, including the media and official authorities, are moved enough to unleash an outcry. That is new. And that is news.
What happened in Sialkot was ghastly in its detail, inhuman in its execution, and numbing in the reaction of those who stood by to just view (and film) it. But even if the magnitude was off all scale, the action itself – that is, vigilante justice – was not new: More than what happened in Sialkot, what is new is the larger national reaction to what happened at Sialkot.
The media has begun asking some important questions (even though parts of the media still seems mostly interested in the voyeuristic elements of violence in action). Government officials, starting with the Sialkot Administrator but later also the police chief and the provincial and national authorities, including the Supreme Court, have moved not just to condemn but to take action. More action and better implementation is required, but public outcry has clearly worked in this case to move the authorities into action.
All of this is exactly how functioning polities should deal with incidents of extremism and vigilantelism. But mostly importantly, all of this is news precisely because this is not how things like this have often been dealt with in the past. The opportunity in this truly horrible event is to turn this into a moment of true introspection about ourselves and the attitudes about violence of the many in society, rather than another voyeuristic titillation about the brutality of the few.
Supreme court or not, the jury is still out on whether we will be able to do so or not.
