Yet another miscarriage of justice! If Benazir Bhutto cannot get justice and her killers are going scot free even though her husband today is the President of the country, Mukhtar Mai cannot hope to fare differently.
So, on Mukhtar Mai’s appeal against the acquittal of her tormentors, Pakistan Supreme Court on Thursday April 21 granted freedom to five of the six accused who have been in jail since 2002. They will be set free this week and Mukhtar Mai has reasons to feel insecure.
She was gang raped on the orders of a kangaroo court in her native village, Meerwala, during the reign of Pervez Musharraf on June 22, 2002. And she became a symbol of voiceless and oppressed women in the country. Because she took courage to speak up and tell the media of her plight
In all probability, either Mukhtar Mai or rights activists will seek a review of the judgement. The government moving the court are rather slim. But it is doubtful the case would meet with any different fate because the highest court in the land sees flaws in evidence and police investigations.
The ruling will embolden Pakistan’s kangaroo courts, which are no more than gatherings of influential or dominant tribes, to pronounce instant punishments to uphold feudal honours.
The age old dictum – might is right will continue to prevail as happened at Meerwala, when the influential Mastoi tribe got Mukhtar Mai punished for an alleged adultery by her 12-year-old brother by arguing that ‘adultery should be settled with adultery’.
In the feudal society that Pakistan is, crime against the lower strata, particularly rape rarely gets reported. It is the fate of the victims and their families to suffer in silence. The plight of Mukhtar Mai will discourage them from speaking up and knocking at courts and police.
As the New York-based Human Rights Watch says, in a broader sense, the court ruling is a setback to ‘the struggle to end violence against women and the cause of an independent rights-respecting judiciary in Pakistan’. The verdict “reflects poorly on the Supreme Court and underscores the reality that while Pakistan`s judiciary is now independent, it retains a deeply embedded bias against women in particular and on rights issues in general”.
This is surprising because in the recent months, the Supreme Court and taking the cue the lower courts have not hesitated to summon police army officials to account for the so called ‘missing persons’.
In one word, the case shows the limits of women’s rights in Pakistan, the stranglehold of the feudals who wield more power than the police, and above all failure of the country’s leadership to establish a people friendly and responsive system even sixty years of Pakistan’s birth as the land of hope for the pure.
