A police state?

The jury is still rightly out whether Pakistan is a democracy. And this question lingers despite the repeated reiterations by politicians and powerful institutions that democracy has arrived and is here to stay. Against these claims must be juxtaposed the realities on the ground.
A democracy inherently is a law and rights based political construct. Any state and society laying claim to being democratic has to be judged on the touchstone of whether all aspects of the state's functioning is lawful and whether citizens' rights are upheld and protected. On these two litmus tests at least, Pakistan appears to be a police state masquerading as a democracy.
Consider some evidence for the above assertion. Extra-judicial disappearances, torture in secret locations and murders are no longer exceptional. What started as a set of measures to quell the nationalist insurgency in Balochistan that started in 2002 have by now spread to all parts of the country. Alongside these illegal and inhuman acts by state institutions (with the deep state centre-stage and immune from accountability even before the highest judicial forums) freedom of expression, another inalienable right in a democracy, has been virtually strangled. The strangulation began from the electronic media some years ago, and by now has laid low even the print media. Having 'conquered' the mainstream media thus, the powers-that-be turned their attention to social media. The five bloggers who were disappeared about a year ago, and whose blogs suddenly sprouted blasphemous material after they were disappeared (a virtual death sentence today in Pakistan), went through the 'normal' treatment at the hands of their abductors before being released. They chose discretion as the better part of valour after regaining their freedom and fled the country with their families, fearing for life and limb. They could, despite their ordeal, consider themselves lucky to have escaped alive.
While our judiciary, unable to dent the backlog of 1.8 million pending cases, has proved not to have been able to play the role of protector and defender of citizens' legal and human rights, our notorious police, freed of all fetters in the name of reform, has used its brutal methods with a vengeance of late. In Karachi, trigger-happy anti-car lifting policemen in plain clothes chased a car that did not stop when asked to, and shot dead a young man, Intizar Ahmed, home for vacations from his studies abroad. Given Karachi's volatile security and crime milieu, it should surprise no one that someone would think twice about stopping when challenged by gunmen out of uniform on the city's streets. MQM-London's leader in Karachi, Professor Hasan Zafar Arif, was found dead in his car in the rear seat in a remote location with signs of bloody violence on his face and body. The police however, have declared his death as being due to 'natural causes'. Baloch nationalist students of Karachi University and Sindhi nationalists throughout the province have been the recipients of the unwanted attentions of the security agencies.
Lest anyone think only Karachi or Sindh as a whole has such incidents, a young woman journalist Shehzadi has been disappeared for the second time for taking up the case of an Indian national, Hamid Ansari, incarcerated in Pakistan while pursuing a love interest, from Lahore (initially) and now Islamabad (after being 'recovered'). A young man, Raza Khan, running a children's people-to-people contact effort with counterparts in India under the rubric 'Aghaaz-e-Dosti' has been disappeared some weeks ago from Lahore. No sign of him so far. Journalist Taha Siddiqui was lucky to have escaped an abduction attempt. Hamid Mir was not so lucky, barely escaping multiple bullet wounds. Raza Rumi escaped firing on his car but his driver was tragically killed. SSP Malir Rao Anwar has been suspended for the extra-judicial murder of Naqeebullah Mehsud, a young aspiring model from Waziristan seeking fame and fortune in Karachi. The SSP has yet to join investigations or be charged. Such is the arrogance and sense of entitlement of our police 'encounter specialists'.
The list of such unlawful transgressions is too long to be contained in this space. A large number of people have disappeared without trace, leaving their families and dear ones in the agony of not even knowing whether their loved ones are alive or dead. The Commission on Enforced Disappearances turned out to be a damp squib unable to or even unwilling to unravel the cocoon of impunity in which the security agencies have wrapped themselves. But why blame the Commission alone? Even the superior judiciary has failed to protect citizens' right to due process and a fair trial in such cases.
While the existence of the deep state is not acknowledged officially and this allows its components to act freely and unlawfully without fear of retribution, the police is an older affliction. At independence we inherited a colonial police, whose role was defined by the British-imposed 1861 Police Act, itself modelled on another colonial police force, the Irish Constabulary. The Irish-South Asian colonial experience has many similarities apart from this one. The purpose of the police set up by the British colonialists in South Asia was control of the restive natives vying for freedom from colonial oppression. This is the force, complete with a colonial structure, culture and mindset that we inherited and used intact till 2002. In that year, the 'Plato' of the Musharraf regime enacted the Police Order 2002 to abolish the executive magistracy (tasked with restraining a police force immersed in the culture of colonial brutality) and concede autonomy to a force far from ready or deserving of being trusted with such a responsibility. The result of this ill-conceived and ill thought through measure that failed to take account of the character of the police as inefficient, corrupt and brutal, has arguably led to the rise in 'encounters' as the autonomous police's modern day answer to crime, lawlessness and terrorism. No marks for guessing where this will lead.
In the 1960s, Latin America saw a rash of guerrilla struggles break out, inspired by the Cuban revolution and in resistance to the military dictatorships that dotted the continent. Disappearances made their first appearance there. The families, especially the mothers of the disappeared, are still struggling for full accountability vis-à-vis their disappeared loved ones to date, despite the rollback of military dictatorships and the emergence of democracy all over Latin America in subsequent decades. Judging by this example and the lack of response to Mama Qadeer's efforts on behalf of the disappeared in Balochistan, Pakistan seems doomed to become a black hole of disappearances.
About three decades ado, when the Left in Pakistan collapsed (a decade before the Soviet union's implosion), it became clear to perceptive observers that the age of mass repression had passed (with obvious exceptions such as Balochistan). What seemed to loom on the horizon in its place was the targeting of critical or dissenting individuals, who could be relatively easily dealt with through extra-judicial methods. It seems we are there today, with extremely weak resistance from political or civil society, legal and human rights defenders, despite exceptional individuals still holding high the banner of liberty.
It seems that without a revival of the Left to wage a principled struggle against the injustices meted out by a police state, Pakistani citizens are likely to suffer much more in this vein.
[email protected] rashed-rahman.blogspot.com