EARLIER this month, Supreme Court Chief Justice Saqib Nisar summoned all the heads of Pakistan’s commercial airlines in the fake pilots’ degrees case. The list included Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi who is the former CEO of Airblue, a private airline founded by him in 2003. Unsurprisingly, then, the CJ did not refrain from commenting on the apparent ‘clash of interests’.

An interesting social reality emerges when the interests of the state and private corporations interact. A grim aspect of this reality surfaced in 2010, when Airblue’s flight 202 crashed into the Margalla hills; and in 2012, when Bhoja Air’s flight 213 crashed near Islamabad on the same route. With almost 300 people dead and the charred remains of several passengers buried in mass graves, a fundamental question still remains: why did Airblue and Bhoja Air escape censure by the state?

First, there was the matter of compensation. The state did not concern itself with the settlement process; the contract was between the airline and the passengers, they claimed. Indeed, some money was doled out from the insurers’ pockets. But this was hardly any consolation given that bereaved families were left to labour through the legal and administrative nightmares on their own. With no help from the government, the victims’ families formed their own support groups and went to court. Eight years on, some are still grappling with litigation for their legal dues.

Then there was the matter of finding answers. Investigation teams were set up under the Civil Aviation Authority, the industry regulator which owns and operates air traffic control systems. A conflict of interest easy to spot from miles away was clearly lost on the state, as was the notion of the right to information, when the CAA refused to share its findings in the Airblue crash for no credible reason. After the report had been shuffled across all the necessary desks, some answers were revealed.

The state has failed to protect people from aviation disasters.

The published version of the Airblue report blamed the crash on ‘pilot error’. However, a court-ordered reinvestigation found the report lacking in crucial details about weather conditions and navigation systems. For those in need of closure, such defects in the truth only worsened the pain. Yet, the state remained unmoved.

The Bhoja Air investigation met a similar fate. Three years after the crash, the short verdict was again ‘pilot error’. The deeper cause: inadequate training systems and regulatory failure.

Thankfully, Bhoja’s licence was suspended a few months later because it lost its fleet. But let’s not be under any delusions: there was no shift in moral compass. Nor was there fear of a backlash. If there was, perhaps Mr Abbasi (a prominent politician at the time) would not have waited three days to send out a deadpan condolence message for the death of 152 passengers on his airline. Not that anyone in the airline industry or the government noticed.

In fact, there was no enforcement intervention from the state at all. The CAA remains unimpressed by the dangers of regulatory failure highlighted by the crashes. To date, amendments in the law to make the safety and investigation board autonomous have not been put to a parliamentary vote.

There is a risk in relying on strictly legal definitions of crime for the state’s failure to protect people from aviation disasters. Except, a failure to formalise the crime does not mean the criminal reality ceases to exist.

In the early 1990s, criminologists Kramer and Michalowski developed a theory called state-corporate crime. One form of it is ‘state-facilitated crime’ which occurs when state regulators fail to restrain deviant business activities. The reason could be direct collusion, or shared goals which demand such deviance be ignored.

This theoretical paradigm aptly explains how the deaths of 279 people aboard Airblue and Bhoja were facilitated by state inaction and negligence. The personal and social injuries ignored by the state (even encouraged) have inflicted as much suffering as the injuries sustained in any heinous crime.

There may not be explicit collusion between the government and the airlines. But the state is no stranger to protecting its political and economic elite. The CAA has also likely resolved that censuring the country’s private airlines, including the largest one, would not bode well.

Given the state’s track record in the production of social harms then, no amount of reproach by the SC is likely to change the status quo. If anything, the latest scandal confirms the existence of an institutional relationship designed to keep regulatory controls at a minimum. This is the reality that drives the state’s crimes. It puts our lives at risk each time we travel. This is more than just the stuff of constitutional petitions.

The writer is a lawyer based in Karachi. The views expressed are her own.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2018