A FEW hours before I was to board a train from Rawalpindi to Peshawar last Thursday, I received a message warning me that activists of religious organisations were waiting to lay siege to the twin cities in the event of a decision in favour of Asia Bibi, the jailed Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy whose final appeal is pending in the Supreme Court. The case was supposed to be heard that day. It wasn’t, and the mobs supposedly waiting to be unleashed were stood down.

I imagine many a concerned resident of the twin cities was relieved, especially given the scenes following Mumtaz Qadri’s hanging earlier this year after the Supreme Court validated his execution. What stood out then was the virtual surrender of the law-enforcement agencies to the mobs; the latter didn’t have to break through barricades and deal with any police action because they were neither blockaded nor lathi-charged.

On this occasion the police and paramilitaries were supposedly deployed to pre-empt similar scenes — although it is hardly unusual for ‘defence of Islam’ campaigners to be treated leniently by the authorities regardless of how well prepared the latter may be to nip protests in the bud. In effect, those who felt relief that right-wing zealots did not take over the twin cities last Thursday indirectly expressed a lack of conviction in the ability and/or willingness of the state’s policing apparatus.

The state has trampled upon the ‘rights’ of its own ‘citizens’.

So where does that leave us? On the one hand, there are continuing calls for the state to clamp down on the ‘non-state’ actors that have eaten society up from the inside, yet on the other hand there is overwhelming evidence confirming that the state does not have the will and/or capacity to do so.

This is not a matter of inaccessible complexity, especially for the drawing room liberals who most vociferously make the demand for the state’s coercive apparatus to ‘do its job’. Indeed, it can be argued that it is reckless to call for the state to live up to its ‘responsibilities’ as prescribed in liberal theory when its real history is that of a colonising entity that has trampled upon the ‘rights’ of its own ‘citizens’.

Cheering on an apparatus which is alleged to have patronised death squads and relegated its own people to the status of subjects without any entitlements provides a mandate to those in power to act with impunity, all in the name of ‘the people’.

A more banal example reinforces the point: a committed left-wing political activist living in Hyderabad whose niece was recently murdered along with a young man in what looked like a typical ‘honour killing’ has spent the last few months trying to get the formal policing apparatus to prosecute the case as per the law. He has faced resistance from within the system at all levels.

Using all means at his disposal, he forced the authorities to exhume the bodies of the murdered couple from their graves. The subsequent autopsy confirmed unnatural deaths but the station house officer at the concerned thana still refused to file an FIR. Utterly frustrated, the activist wrote an article in a Sindhi daily documenting the complete ineptitude of relevant state functionaries, stopping short of asserting obstruction of justice. One of the senior-most police officers in Hyderabad responded by issuing an official press release claiming that the young couple died of natural causes.

A politically conscious individual with enough wherewithal to pursue a matter of this nature is unable to secure even a modicum of justice from the very institutions of state charged with the dispensation of justice. What then might we expect is the plight of the vast majority of working people in this country who encounter thana, katcheri and patwari on a daily basis?

Some argue that the state has become increasingly incoherent over the past few decades, that the situation has deteriorated because of incompetent leaders, that if the will is generated by those who call the shots, the institutional impetus will follow. This is neither here nor there — it seems the vast majority of state functionaries use their office for parochial ends rather than to serve the public interest. The ‘lack of will’ must then be seen as an endemic problem that will not be addressed by replacing a few individuals at the top of the tree (as Imran Khan’s rants against the Sharifs would suggest).

The state has never been — and without a far-reaching transformation will not be — the guarantor of the basic needs and freedoms of the people of this country. Those who seek power via induction into the permanent state apparatus do not have delusions about serving the people, whereas only a small fraction of those seeking election to political office do so to foment change.

Reinforcing our collective state of confusion impedes the building of a genuine political alternative.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, October 21st, 2016