A public gang rape, beating and burning and sacrificial disposal of women for vinni and karo kari, is routine in South Punjab and rural Pakistan, which is ablaze with pure Islam. Dozens of unfortunate, kidnapped or sold-away women are gang-raped daily as so-called sex workers. That too is routine. These do not burden our soul or mind.
On the issue of "sex-workers", the representative of divine morality may find license in the holy permissions about slave girls and paid "Tamatta". A liberated intellectual/ human rights activist may even glorify and support the practice as expression of liberty, without investigating the tragic origins of these " Sex Artists".
Is misery and helpless suffering limited to the gang-rape of one woman? After she has received such prominence, prosperity and honour including access to international benefits, shall we struggle for a Nobel Prize for her? Or is it a case of selective revenge? Every extravagence is possible in a highly selective, chance-based society. We are selective in application of morality, selective in bestowing honor, selective in appreciation, selective in providing humanitarian support. And this selectiveness itself seems to be based on selection-by-chance, sometimes even on the pattern of natural selection, of a suo moto pattern. Human element of justice for all, of a systemic morality is not to our taste. A married lady-doctor was raped by some army officer in Baluchistan. She failed to find the status of a Mai or of an Afia Siddiqui, and was exiled to oblivion along with her family. Was her suffering and humiliation lesser? Or was it that she could not narrate her case with such ultra modern candor? I think the law of natural selection presides over the motivations of our society, civil and uncivil equally. By - Mobarak Haider
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