A group of clerics in Islamabad issues a stern warning to the city court that, if a college professor cum homeopathic doctor, on trial for blaspheming the Holy Prophet (PBUH), is not given capital punishment they will personally execute him.

            In Kohat, a jirga rules that if an Afridi woman, who has remarried, is given custody of her 16-year-old daughter from her first marriage, by the Peshawar High Court, they will kill her, her husband and her daughter.

            And back in the country’s economic lifeline, Karachi, the Sunni Tehreek brings life to a crying halt because the assassins of their leader, Saleem Qadri, are still at large: they threaten to call for more curfew-like strikes if the killers are not arrested within a stipulated time.

            We, as a nation, have become pastmasters in the art of issuing threats: Oblige or else…  It’s a free for all and no one’s in charge.  Anarchy rules supreme and the rulers of the day are beginning to look pathetic by the hour. Mini states operate within the state, throwing brazen challenges to its authority, but the government recoils from any moves to confront them head-on.  What is holding the government back – fear, incompetence or, more likely, a ‘mercenary’ reason?

            This impotence on the government’s part portends a bleak and bloody future.  The obscurantist forces have unleashed a storm of intolerance – and the force and fury of that storm is growing unchecked, and threatens to engulf the length and breadth of the country in a civil war. The country was split along political, ethnic and sectarian lines. Now believers of the same sect are gunning for each other.

            Additionally, members of one tribe are baying for the blood of a woman from the same tribe only because she wants custody of her own flesh and blood.

            ‘Ostensibly’ religious men are demanding death for a college professor simply because they believe he is guilty of blasphemy. What kind of Islam do they practise that preaches injustice and inhumanity to mankind and indemnifies such irrational behaviour?

            And where is the law ? Is it only pressed into service to throw former prime ministers into prison or out of the country?

            Are we living in barbaric times where death is the only solution to all life’s problems? At what point does the government step in – only when a general’s life is in danger in the air? Do the ground realities figure in the military dispensation’s scheme of things?

            In his interviews with the foreign media, the general has been making tall claims about Pakistan being a modern, progressive and liberal state.

            Now is the time to show the world exactly how liberal is liberal.