With reference to Justice (retd.) Majida Rizvi’s interview, A barbaric practice (June 13), I admire the retired Justice as she is a very courageous and gutsy woman. In the interview she was asked if clerics should tell worshippers to respect their wives, mothers, sisters and daughters and give them all the rights that any human being should have. I think in a perfect world the pesh imams and clerics would do that. But sadly, this is Pakistan and we do not have an ideal or a perfect society.
I am sure that 99 per cent of the pesh imams clerics would never say that. The maulanas at the mosques I have been to, say that “don’t let your women out of the house,” “women are a man’s subjects,” and “women should not be allowed to work and study”.
With beliefs like that, how can anyone expect these people to educate men on the true rights of women?
FAWWAD SHAFI
Karachi
Policing Karachi is no joke
With reference to Shoaib Suddle’s interview, Policing Karachi is no joke (June 20), while it is true that Karachi has increasingly become a more volatile and threatening environment, I would not say that we Pakistanis look at matters of law and order as a joke.
The real travesty here is that an individual like Mr Shoaib Suddle, who was one of the accused in the assassinations of Mir Murtaza Bhutto and Ashiq Jatoi is made director-general of the National Police Bureau. Is Mr Suddle being sarcastic then when he is able to calmly declare that our police administration must be properly “insulated from undesirable extraneous influences” must be properly “insulated from undesirable extraneous influences” since it allows policemen to “feel that even if he does something wrong he won’t be punished because of connections”? If not, then it would follow that Mr Suddle is a walking paradigm of what is wrong with our current police administration, and, it would seem, by his own admission.
If the police are to be turned into a “public-friendly institution” and bear the burden of becoming “symbols of trust” within their society, then there needs to be a complete overhaul of the bureaucracy that — with no apparent hint of irony — allowed a person who was part of a murder inquiry to take the reigns of implementation of police reforms. For our society to endure a truly sustainable reformation of its system, we must charge ourselves with the responsibility of viewing ourselves, as in Plato’s Republic, as part of one body where harm inflicted on any one of its parts affects its entire constitution. When the body is sick, all parts must mobilize in order to cure and mend its ills, at the risk of their own comfort and security. The answer hardly lies in crowning the virus and entrusting it to weed itself out of the body.
Karachi’s law and order situation does not stem exclusively from foreign elements within its midst. We have corrupt elements internally as well. Sometimes the cancer is closer to home.
FATIMA BHUTTO
Karachi
Dangerous manoeuvres
With reference to the article Dangerous manoeuvres (June 13), the article has successfully captured the heinous crime of invasion of privacy by cyber-cafe owners. The writer describes the victims’ situation as “the unfortunate souls and the emotional turmoil they would suffer at such a young age”. But sadly, the article overlooks the fact that these “unfortunate souls” choose this situation for themselves. A cyber-cafe isn’t the best place to satiate your desperate desires and fantasies. If the victims themselves had thought once before plunging into vulgarity in cyber-cafe booths, none of this would have happened, and the perpetrators wouldn’t have had the chance to exploit them. If we look at the positive side of the unveiling of this transgression, we will come to know that at least we are aware of the fact that Net surfing is not the only purpose for which cyber-cafes are used these days.
Society has been exposed to the moral wrongs that teenagers can succumb to under the influence of Pakistani and Indian movies. But I am glad to see that this matter has been greatly publicized on the media, due to which the government has taken stern action to appease the victims. Not only have the commercial marketing of these CDs come to a halt but the entry of couples in cyber-cafes has also been banned.
This article was rhetorically presented but it would have been more accurate if the wrong doings of the not-so-innocent victims were also highlighted.
