WHAT do you do if you are a poor person and your daughter, a maid in a rich man’s house, is found dead, hanging by a fan in mysterious circumstances — suggesting possible rape and murder instead of a suicide?

What do you do if you are a poor villager and your daughter is gunned down in broad daylight by a local influential person in the home constituency of the chief minister reportedly over refusal of a marriage proposal?

Should the police not automatically register these cases and apprehend the criminals? Sadly, the police will neither register a case nor investigate the matter. The law is meant to protect the families of the rich and the powerful and not to apprehend them.

So you collect all your relatives and friends and protest outside the police station demanding the registration of the case. But this is not good enough. You next take your already grief-stricken families to the press club and wail and plead in front of TV cameras and reporters to ask the rulers to provide justice. When the protest pictures appear in the newspapers, only then are the police forced to register a case — at least on paper — to be permanently buried in dusty files.

Is there no natural and built-in system for police to register cases and apprehend criminals without protests from the aggrieved family?

A murder is a crime against state and the state must come to the aid of its citizens. Will the IG Police, Sindh, institutionalise the process of the registration of FIRs and not force the victims’ families to hold protests, sit-ins and hunger strikes to obtain their fundamental right to life?

Naeem Sadiq

Karachi

Published in Dawn, September 24th, 2017