Blasphemy law will do damage again!

The National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Human Rights has urged the government to re-examine the blasphemy law and improve its procedure. When we say “re-examine” we may be expressing a secret desire to change the wording of the law to prevent it from victimising innocent people. We still don’t say “repeal” although that is what it deserves after what it has done to a lot of innocent people in Pakistan, of which nearly half have belonged to our poor Christian community.

The Standing Committee is still a bit pusillanimous and has quickly added “procedures” knowing full well that the procedures have been changed a number of times in the past with no effect. The police doesn’t care for procedures or is perhaps forced to discard them in the face of those who want to exploit the Blasphemy Law. Yet, it should have noted that it is just one organisation — the banned Sipah-e-Sahaba — that causes most of the violence to take place under the law.

A Lahore High Court judge is painstakingly recording the evidence of the wronged Christians of Gojra when their houses were torched in the last week of August. His pace is quite remarkable with 320 statements of eye-witnesses taken down. Meanwhile, however, the banned Sipah has not stopped its savagery: the Christian community of Mariamabad, a Catholic village in Sheikhupura district, has received threatening phone-calls from it vowing to reduce it to a pile of ashes like Gojra.

The Standing Committee has complained that the intelligence units of the police do nothing to pre-empt Sipah attacks. Everyone knows that trouble starts from the mosques which can be put under unobtrusive surveillance if our spooks take time out from fighting mythical battles with Mossad and RAW. (And offering up a “desk” analysis saying Gojra was done by India.) As the PMLN leader Mr Javed Hashmi courageously and rightly stated in the house, the law has to be changed to prevent persecution of innocent Pakistanis.

(Editorial of Daily Times)