A REUTERS news feature built around the case of an unfortunate woman near Multan is a telling indictment of a society that is still stuck in mediaeval times. The woman was targeted in April by a band looking to settle a score with her husband. Moved by revenge and sustained by its own appalling concepts of retributive justice, the band cut off “six of Asma's fingers, slashed her arms and lips and then sliced off her nose”. The victim of the gory attack still lies in a Multan hospital, leaving her father to answer journalists who want to know whether she will ever be able to go back to her husband. Instead, given the state in which she is, they should be asking if she will ever return from the dead.

The news feature on Asma Firdous's plight takes us on a course where we come across all the usual actors. The feudal lords that protect the system have as much a role to play as the conscientious supporters of the jirga and panchayat system. The rights activists have very much been a part of the honour-revenge narrative and they are includes in this saga too. Charting an excruciatingly painful but familiar route, the story ends, as all such stories do, after knocking desperately at the doors of the creators of the state's writ: those who make and implement the law and those who are responsible for ensuring the rule of law. The charge-sheet against the government is as complete as it has ever been and the judiciary also gets as rude a wakeup call as convention and etiquette allow. Of the many issues related to the public, these law-related matters suffer most when the government and judiciary cannot have a working relationship. Free of their own little battles for supremacy, the judges and officers of the executive branch of state can be expected to jointly take up the reform of a system that is too toothless to protect the life and dignity of its women. People versus the state — this is really a case that is crying out for a hearing.