FROM ordering live burnings and forced marriages to rape, jirgas persist as a parallel justice system that violates human rights. The influential in rural settings opt for tribal institutions over courts of law to coerce the weak into either settling for compensation or issue rulings that favour the oppressors. Therefore, what happened in Tandlianwala, Faisalabad, is unsurprising. A police inquiry into an ‘attempted’ rape case of a 12-year-old boy declared that the suspect mentioned in the FIR was acquitted “on the mediation of a jirga/ panchayat, a blatant violation of the Supreme Court judgement”. The accused cleric, Abubakar Muavia, was cleared on March 30, when the police presented him in court to seek an extension of his physical remand. The apex court’s landmark judgement in 2019 had said that jirgas and panchayats were unconstitutional and did not fall under any other law to the extent that they arbitrate on civil and criminal issues. While this case will now be reinvestigated, the fact is that as long as ‘councils of elders’ exist as fora for mediation and negotiation in the four provinces, the law will continue to be flouted to preserves social hierarchies.

What this society cannot afford is to see abuse in seminaries as isolated instances. Children routinely endure cruelty, exploitation, rape and sexual abuse at the hands of clerics. News about students being pushed from madressah rooftops, battered with sticks and subjected to extreme violence that makes their eyes bleed appears with shameful regularity. They are windows into the darkness of spaces where predators intimidate to foster an environment of impunity. Besides, scores of unregistered seminaries are difficult to monitor. These crimes cannot stop unless the state makes registration and stringent regulation mandatory. An international study conducted a couple of years ago shows a favourable shift: 80pc of the population in the tribal areas of former Fata was against jirgas. Delayed judgements and pending cases, a hostile environment for the marginalised in police stations, particularly women, minorities and the poor, and illiteracy are factors that create a lack of trust in the judicial system and prevent people from challenging the social and legal implications of jirgas. Hence, as the Asian Human Rights Commission observed in 2016, the “jirga’s antidote is a fair and functional justice system” to save future generations from abuse.

Published in Dawn, April 4th, 2024