Asia Sacrificed

We are all oblivious to the fact that it is just not cattle that we sacrificing here; Asia Bibi a mother of five Christian daily wage farm worker from the village of Ittanwali has been sentenced to death under the infamous blasphemous law.She committed the crime of giving water to her fellow farm workers which obviously had become ‘unclean’ because of her faith. Asia Bibi expressed her outrage at this act of shameless injustice and claimed that her faith was good as that of Muslims. Asia soon found out the gravity of the mistake she had committed by speaking for her dignity and respect, when she was chased and howled at by a mob led by a local mullah. She was taken in ‘protective custody’ by the local police and was taken in at the Nankana police station. Police then charged Asia under the heinous blasphemy law and was moved to Shekhupura District Jail. Asia’s story is so common place in our society that the news of a judge sentencing a woman to death over such petty altercation hardly registered on national news. Such is our collective mind set that we are ready to sacrifice many such Asias to satisfy our animal instincts. The Civil judge passed the judgment where he ‘ruled out’ any chance that the poor woman was falsely implicated in the case. By passing death sentence to Asia the judge has told to every member of the minority community that they are unclean and any attempt to defend themselves against such bigotry will make them guilt of blasphemy. The obscene consequences of the blasphemy laws have been evident for decades now through the continued criminalization and persecution of those the state ought to actually be protecting. Human Rights Watch has long argued that Sections 295 and 298 of the Pakistan Penal Code ought to be repealed in totality. Failure to repeal makes successive governments, and the state itself, complicit in heinous discrimination and egregious human rights abuse. So long as the state continues to act as a sectarian, partisan actor and the judiciary continues to uphold discriminatory laws and provide legal justifications for the misplaced values they enshrine, there will be many more victims like Aasia Bibi silently suffering in the shadows.