“Certain media persons incited violence and practiced hate speech in the wake of abduction of five bloggers by accusing them of blasphemy. They are also responsible for what happened in Mardan”
Source/Credit: Pakistan Today
By Ailia Zehra | April 30, 2017
The political leadership’s inaction following the lynching of university student Mashal Khan in Mardan over blasphemy accusations is disappointing, but not at all surprising. A lot has been said and written on the urgent need to introduce reforms to the blasphemy law in order to prevent its misuse, but the government doesn’t seem to have a will to make any efforts in this regard. Blasphemy-related violence has been going on for years and, as a matter of fact, police have always played the role of silent spectator in almost all cases of mob justice.
Pakistan’s leadership agreed to chalk out a strategy to deal with extremism following an attack on Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar and formed a unanimous National Action Plan but the government has so far done little to ensure its implementation. Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar is the one responsible to oversee the implementation of NAP and work on providing a counter-narrative to the narrative the Taliban created over the years, but he seems least interested in his job. The minister is nowhere to be seen when there is an incident of terrorism in the country, but was rather quick to tell the Islamabad High Court that the government would ban social media if the sites refuse to remove ‘blasphemous content’.
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