This year, on the first death anniversary of civil rights activist, Sabeen Mahmud, an awkward little battle erupted on Twitter between two sections of her supporters.

I signed in to my timeline, flooded with folk hailing the slain activist as a brave woman who was downed for trying to highlight the plight of the Baloch people.

However, soon, Twitter-handles belonging to this section were being asked by the other section to explain just how they had reached this conclusion when there were men awaiting trial for allegedly assassinating Sabeen — men who were said to be self-confessed sympathisers of ISIS.

This section of Sabeen’s supporters bemoaned that some people were using her name to further their agenda (ie Baloch nationalism). The section being accused of doing so retaliated by saying that those who believed she was cut down by self-professed religious militants were being duped by the state. This section alluded that it was the state which had taken out Sabeen.

The memory of someone slain for something they strongly believed in is best served when the law and the courts are allowed to take their course

Yes, there are men awaiting trial for her murder and, according to both police and media reports, the alleged assassins have already confessed their sympathies for the so-called ISIS. But it is also true that Sabeen was downed almost immediately after she had held an open discussion on the volatile situation in Balochistan.

The truth is, one year after her tragic demise, nothing concrete as such has emerged which can suggest that she was killed (by the state) due to her insistence on holding a talk on Balochistan.

On the other hand, last year, Pakistan’s premier English language monthly, Herald, ran a detailed story on Sabeen’s murder, with a detailed interview of one of the prime suspects being held by the Karachi police. He claimed to have had problems with Sabeen’s pluralistic beliefs.

The Herald story did not pass any judgment, and rightly so, because it is for the courts to establish the facts behind the activist’s unfortunate murder.

It was thus awkward watching her name being thrown to and fro between two groups, both loudly navel-gazing on Twitter about the ‘true cause’ of her brutal demise, and accusing each other of using her name to forward their own ‘agendas.’

There was yet another section involved in this knee-jerk Twitter discourse as well. The one which, without any hesitation, is always willing to exhibit a rather warped and soulless dimension of the human condition by actually rationalising (if not entirely celebrating) nihilistic acts of violence done in the name of faith.

The same thing happened again last week when another civil rights activist, Khurram Zaki, was mercilessly gunned down in Karachi. On Twitter, as Zaki’s demise triggered a wave of anger against certain sectarian outfits, these cries were matched by counterclaims bemoaning that names were being taken without evidence.

Outbursts of emotions, accusations and counter-accusations that erupt on social media due to shocking acts of terror are understandable. Especially in a country where the state has been struggling to keep in check forces of anarchy, [and (more so) where on various occasions the state itself has also been accused of not caring at all.]

But it won’t be an overstatement to suggest that things in this context are changing. The state is now in the process of trying to wriggle out of the quagmires it had uncannily created and then fallen into. Quagmires made for purposes which have now become problems. There is still a long way to go, though.

Outbursts are cathartic. However, therein lie not answers, but further confusion.

The nature of the Twitter discourse on Zaki’s slaying was such that it directly impacted the reporting done on the incident even by some well-known names in Western journalism.

The New York Times (NYT) story on the incident more than alluded that Zaki was taken out because of his continual criticism of certain faith-based outfits; whereas another news outlet of repute, Britain’s The Independent, seemed sure that he was killed due to his views on the recent victory of a British-Pakistani, Sadiq Khan, in London’s mayoral election.

Whereas the NYT story seemed to be a tad too influenced by the outpour of anger and grief on social media, The Independent took and ran with one of Zaki’s last Tweets in which he had suggested that Sadiq Khan had won the election not because he is Muslim, or born to Pakistani parents, but because he is a hardworking man in a system which rewards merit. Quite incredibly, The Independent believed saying this is what got him killed.

So as Zaki’s figurative body was pulled one way by NYT, The Independent pulled it the other way. And again, there were also those who somehow always end up finding fault in the victim.

The memory of someone slain for something they strongly believed in is best served when the law and the courts are allowed to take their course, and when time is given for the answers to emerge. And now, more often than not, answers do emerge. But social media discourses studded with prolonged outbursts and countered by ossifications are certainly not the things from where such answers will ever arise.

The same memory actually gets trivialised by the many bizarre, multipronged duels on social media; especially when such duels begin to inform the mainstream media as well.

All this reminds me of an incident a senior colleague of mine once shared with me. In 1982, when Karachi witnessed one of its first major sectarian riots, the mentioned colleague was covering it as a reporter for an Urdu daily.

When the riot was finally quelled by the military, a group of men belonging to one sect began marching in the streets with the body of a comrade who had been killed in the rioting. They blamed the killing on the opposing sect.

However, some 40 minutes later, a group of men belonging to the other sect arrived. After clashing with the opposite group, they snatched the body away and began to claim that the man actually belonged to their sect and was killed by the group of men who had been carrying his body before them.

According to the senior colleague, the body could not be buried for almost two days. It kept moving from one group to the other, with both claiming that it belonged to their respective sects.

When I asked the colleague whose sect did the body really belong to, he had just shrugged his shoulders and chuckled cynically: “Who knows! Most probably the poor man was not even a Muslim.”

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 15th, 2016