Our varying standards of constitutional due process

A 42-year-old hardworking, honest teacher at a government school in Rabwah was brutally tortured by police. The injuries he sustained led to his untimely demise. His name was Abdul Qudoos. The irony is that this law-abiding citizen for God knows what reason was picked up as a suspect in a murder investigation but was never formally charged. In a blatant violation of the constitutional rights guaranteed to the citizens of Pakistan under Article 10 of the Constitution, which requires production before a magistrate within 24 hours of the arrest beyond which custody is unlawful, Qudoos was tortured for many days and only allowed to go after it looked like he was not going to survive. 

Persecution of Ahmadis in the Islamic Republic

The basic premise on which we won ourselves Pakistan was that a permanent majority cannot and should not dominate a permanent minority on account of numeric strength. Yet contrary to that founding logic, Pakistan is today legally a totalitarian fundamentalist theocracy

A fresh round of hate has been unleashed against the hapless Ahmediyya community once again. A young woman has been expelled from her university for daring to stand up to hate speech against her community on campus in Lahore. In Rawalpindi, ignorant and boorish mobs have been agitating to close down an Ahmedi ‘place of worship’ for being ‘unconstitutional’. In other words, practising their own faith in their own space is deemed unconstitutional by a mob that has probably never opened the constitution. All the while this community goes on praying and fasting for Pakistan, where a majority continues to persecute them for believing differently.