To Zainab With Love

This was not at all how I wanted to start my first post of 2018 but regrettably traumas and painful events have become norm of the day. Once again a seven year old child has been brutally murdered and molested in Kasur, Pakistan. This news had its predecessor few years ago when hundreds of children were molested and their families were blackmailed. Everyone on social media is rightfully protesting to arrest the criminal(s) behind this heinous offence.

I don’t think it is a random secluded crime that just happened. Whatever we are seeing today in the form of this news is just the tip of an iceberg, an effect of something that has a profound grave cause lurking in the darkness.

The society we proudly present as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has nothing left in it which is either Islamic or republican. We are a society with a torn moral fibre. These kinds of unfortunate events are the direct reflection of not merely state failure, but the failure of humanity.

This is what happens to a country where corruption and lawlessness prevail. Some might argue that the man who assaulted and cruelly threw a child’s body in the trash could be psychotic. I don’t know what his mental state was but, what I know for sure that he had no fear. He and many paedophiles are fully aware that no one will apprehend him. They walk freely because they know that no one in power really cares, no one is bothered to arrest psychos or rapists.

What I firmly believe that if there is a strong grip of law and people in higher echelons of power have determination to really do something about it, then and only then we might be able to tell our children that they are safe.

On the other hand, all of us have to thoroughly check our consciences and really ask ourselves, how and where we as a nation have failed. 

Sonya Syed (Day 571)