Published in Dawn

Farrukh Aziz · #1 Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Domestic violence against women in innumerable forms and manifestations is not a new phenomenon so far as interior Sindh generally and Pakistan at large are concerned, but in the past three months, the acts of barbarism went too far even beyond the boiling point where the violence toll, as per a survey, rose to over 500 incidents.

Most of the victims of the woman abuse, the report noted, were the minors and teenage girls though the married and unmarried as well as aged women too have the same fate, that is, to be subjected to heinous offences of murder, honor killing, instigation to suicide, sexual assault, torture, gang rape, prostitution, molestation and notably Karo Kari and Jirga verdicts.

If one looks on the living standard of women in the hinterlands of Sindh, and the way they are dealt with, domineered and exploited, their status, one realizes, is far below the line of a liveable and civilized life, God entitles them to, and our supreme law under its sacred articles 25 (2), 34,37, and 38 guarantees.

The report observed that the liability for most of the onslaughts upon the guiltless weaker sex lies, one way or the other, mainly on Sardar Sain and local self-designated lords and at the same time our impotent authorities dancing to their tunes.

Karo Kari, a nasty and a diabolic ritual prevailing as a remnant of dark ages, has now hardened into a local legal act, authorizing the Sardar Sain to issue an edict, permitting a perpetrator to slay poor souls just because they want to tie the knot with the person they are in love with. If they have to escape death penalty, they are required by " Sardar Sain penal code" to pay huge penny in the form of " Chatti", a daylight robbery.

Most remorsefully, our law enforcement agencies themselves help these feudals arrange jirgas: in I.G office Karachi, I met an AIG--a famous personality in Sindh police-- asking meekly a feudal to adjudicate a Karo Kari case.

What is even more heartrending is the kind of justice; a raw deal meted out to the relatives of the victims, approaching police for lodging the preliminary FIR. In this way, most cases of rape,Karo Kari etc., are hushed up or sometimes the relatives of the dead owning to ignominy " Badnaami" simply give up.

Not long ago, one of my neighbour ; a boy in his prime, too, fell to the same lot, yes badly tortured with his eyes scraped with a knife, he was murdered in cold blood on the pretext of honor killing, and later his mother was phoned: " Come! Receive the body of your son or else we shall throw it away in the gutter!" Yes all this happened in one of the hustling districts of Sindh. What is more to your surprise is the culprit was standing shoulder to shoulder with the MPA in election campaign. The relatives of the murdered when enquired of the FIR contended " Might is right. Our lodging FIR is like crying for the Moon. Justice is too costly here. It is on Doomsday that we shall lodge our FIR in God's court."

http://www.dawn.com/news/1138689/domestic-violence

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