Deweaponisation
 

Deweaponisation
Agha Faisal

Anarchy rules the streets of Pakistan and criminals strike citizens at will with total impunity. Murder and mayhem have become an accepted norm and the number of lives lost each day is displayed like cricket scores by the media. After the failure of the legislature and executive to control the situation, the judiciary has taken notice of the disastrous law and order problem. Among the many directions and recommendations of the judiciary, there is one that propagates deweaponisation in Pakistan.
However, the noble intention of the judiciary in this regard is being misconstrued and misapplied to hamper a citizen’s lawful right to self-defence, which is the last bastion of safety for the citizens in the face of the complete failure of the state to protect their lives and livelihoods.
The only effort at the implementation level seems to be revalidation of arms licences, as if that it is the magic cure for the anarchy that rules the streets. The media gives statistics of the number of licences issued each month, as if to suggest that these licences are the cause of the mayhem in our country.
The federal ministry of interior broke its own record of whimsical orders by decreeing in August 2011 that all arms licences issued in the form of booklets shall stand cancelled, unless they are replaced by cards issued by Nadra. The licence-holders were required to apply for the new cards at Nadra offices and a fee of Rs1,000 was charged per application. The interior ministry passed this order without regard to the fact that the law governing arms in Pakistan, the Pakistan Arms Ordinance 1965, contains no provision for Nadra to issue or renew arms licences.
Fortunately, in April 2012, a divisional bench of the Sindh High Court declared the scheme of the interior ministry as without lawful authority and of no legal effect. However, the scheme of the interior ministry did bear fruit in one respect as the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding citizens who paid the Rs1,000 per application were never refunded that amount.
The misfired salvo of the interior ministry was not without precedent. Lt Gen Moinuddin Haider, as minister of interior during the Musharraf era, had also come up with a scheme to ‘re-register’ all arms licences, and any licence not re-registered would be deemed to have been cancelled. Even back then, all bona-fide licence-holders rushed to have their valid licences re-registered, but the mayhem continued in the country.
Is there a licence for owning bombs? Do suicide-bombers need Nadra-issued cards granting them the licence to blow themselves? Do criminals go through the arduous process of obtaining ‘prohibited-bore’ licences before they decide to spray people with AK-47s? Do those who run torture cells apply for licences for the knives they use for mutilating people, as you do need one for knives with more than a four-inch blade? If the answer is ‘no,’ then what is the rationale behind these harebrained schemes, which only perpetuate the illusion of efficiency, harassing law-abiding bona-fide licence-holders?
Let us accept that the state is unable to protect us and that (to say this at the risk of sounding anarchistic), we need to protect our lives and livelihoods ourselves. So how do we go about doing that? The first step is to fill up a detailed licence form and submit it to the relevant agency, together with a copy of your identity card and national taxation number certificate. The application is then scrutinised by the home department, or the interior department as the case may be. Then, if the application is found in order, it is forwarded to the police and intelligence departments. The licence is issued once the law-enforcement departments clear the applicant and submit the clearance in writing to the issuing authority.
The licence is then taken to an authorised arms dealer, who enters a weapon onto the licence. The licence is then taken to the office of the area deputy commissioner for registration of the licence and the weapon entered in it. Subsequently, the licence-holder must visit the area police station to once again register the licence and the weapon. But wait, that’s not all: the licence-holder must now apply to the home department, or the interior department as the case may be, for issuance of a permit to carry the licensed weapon in the event that section 144 of the CrPC is imposed in the city, which frequently is the case. This permit for exemption from section 144 must be renewed quarterly or else it lapses.
I am sure that our process of procuring an arms licence is worthy of consideration as an Olympic sport and I am equally sure that no criminal would ever bother participating in such a sport. Why bother when you can obtain an AK-47 on rent by the hour?
God only knows what further calisthenics the yet-to-be-enacted Sindh Arms Act 2012 will make the licence-holders perform. The draft of the act was shown to a Supreme Court bench in Karachi recently and a judge rightly observed that it contained no provision or exemption for the decommissioned antique weapons that people collect as a hobby.
The government has a duty to protect its citizens and, till such time as it is able to discharge this duty, it has no right to prevent citizens from defending themselves. Recently, criminal proceedings were registered against relevant officials of the KESC for their failure to prevent the death of a citizen during a fire at their offices in Karachi. Does this mean that the victims of crime in the country can initiate criminal proceedings against officers of our law-enforcement agencies for failure to prevent these crimes?
Our police stations look like Fort Knox with barricades, sandbagged machinegun nests and rooftop snipers ringing the periphery. Our law-enforcement officers travel in armoured vehicles accompanied by battalions of guards armed to the teeth. Even with this level of security, members of our law-enforcement agencies fall prey to bullets every day. The private home of one of our police officers was blown to smithereens by a car bomb. Yes, our law-enforcement officers need this level of protection, and even more, but then so do the citizens of Pakistan.
The causes of the lawlessness that rules Pakistan are no secret. Our law-enforcement forces, hired on considerations other than merit, are ill-equipped. Our officers are afforded no protection of life or tenure, our policeman-to-citizen ratio is one of the lowest in the world, and even the few we have are assigned to ceremonial VIP duty. Our prosecution services suffer the same infirmities that afflict the law-enforcement agencies and hence we are unable to prosecute the criminals that are apprehended. And, with due respect, our overburdened judicial process fares no better with convictions or sustaining convictions.
We have private militias, militant wings of registered political parties and gangs of mercenaries available for hire in this country. We have institutionalised extortion rackets and we have turf wars between these extortionists. Illegal firearms are available with more ease than water is in most localities. We have bomb-making factories working overtime, makings bombs not with fertiliser but with military-grade plastic explosives. We have torture cells that would make Uday Hussein gush with pride if he ran one like them. Yet the state pays mere lip service to the tackling of these serious matters and focuses instead on the captive audience of bona-fide licence-holders.
The laws already exist for dealing with illegal weapons and explosives and the weakness lies not in the laws but in their application. The law-and-order situation can only improve if progressive structural reforms are implemented within our law-enforcement agencies, prosecution services and the judicial system. It is about time the state began to tackle these real issues, rather than wasting the country’s resources revalidating otherwise-valid arms licences.

The writer is a barrister at law.