The statement, that the guilty will not escape justice no matter how influential they are, as promised by Mr Khadim e aala, Mr Shahbaz Sharif, was the only thing predictable about this most bestial and degrading of all crimes.
That the cover-up is already underway, should also have been equally predictable. Witness the following:
a. Immediately as the crime is exposed, Rana Sanaullah stated that it had never occurred.
b. A two-man committee of inquiry had already come to this conclusion, and it is on the basis of the conclusions of this committee that Rana made his statement.
c. The inquiry committee had been formed, assembled, had collected evidence, recorded its conclusion, and submitted its report to the Punjab Government even before the news of this mega crime had burst in headlines.
d. The speaker of the National Assembly has ruled out discussion of this horrendous crime in the august house, reasoning that since it was a provincial issue, it should not be agitated at the center!
e. The crime has been ongoing for the last nine years, and the cover-up, a work in progress, has kept faithful pace with this crime, and not allowed it to be uncovered.
Will the cover-up succeed, or is it time that justice will finally score a point?
Justice cannot succeed because it cannot be allowed to succeed. Had the ongoing cover-up been a private matter, justice could have stood a chance. But the cover-up being official, protected by a “system” which is vested in injustice, the system itself will be overthrown if justice were allowed to prevail.
Had the children involved been those of the elite, justice would have succeeded. But if that had been the case, the outrage could not have lasted nine days, what to speak of nine years! But in this case the children, sometimes patronizingly referred to as the “future of the nation”, belong to families who are underprivileged and have no future anyhow. To have justice dispensed in their case would be a contradiction in terms of the social contract.
In the social contract as it exists today, we should expect the type of justice being dispensed to the people of Pakistan, and the sort of governance they must bear. In an extractive and exclusionary dispensation to have hoped for anything else could only have been lunacy.
So Justice will remain just the word that it is.