London, Oct 4(ANI): The blasphemy furore in Pakistan exposes the fragility of the state- ideological, legal and security-wise, a British newspaper has said.
In theory, Pakistan is a country that welcomes all creeds and castes, but in practice, it is proving to be anything but that, The Guardian reports.
It cited the case of Faryal Bhatti, a 13-year-old Christian girl recently expelled from school for the crime of bad spelling.
The teenage girl was sitting an Urdu exam which involved a poem about the prophet Muhammad when she dropped a dot on the Urdu word naat (a devotional hymn to the prophet), accidentally turning it into lanaat, or damnation, the paper said.
Spotting the error, her teacher scolded her, beat her and reported the matter to the principal, and the news soon flamed through her community in Havelian, 30 miles north of Islamabad.
Mullahs raged against Bhatti in their sermons, a school inquiry was hastily convened to examine the matter while the girl was expelled from the school. Meanwhile, her mother, a government nurse, was banished to another town, and the family has since fled Havelian in fear of their lives- all over a missing dot, the paper added.
Recently, the supporters of Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, who has been sentenced to death in the Salmaan Taseer murder case by an anti-terrorism court (ATC) in Pakistan, took to the streets to denounce the verdict soon after it was handed down.
Qadri, one of Taseer's own elite security force protectors, had shot the then Punjab Governor dead on January 4 because of his vocal opposition to the blasphemy law that was recently used to sentence a Pakistani-Christian woman, Asia Bibi, to death.
The furore over the killing of Punjab governor Salmaan Tasser for allegedly licentious behaviour is merely the latest and most extreme example of an appallingly divisive issue, the paper said.
The mixing of religion and politics has long troubled Pakistan, but over the past 30 years that dangerous cocktail has been spiked by the army's 30-year-old policy of nurturing extremists - hence men like Qadri who believe they have a right to kill in the name of God, the paper noted.
"In truth, Taseer's baby-faced killer is unlikely to be hanged any time soon. A lengthy appeals process is just starting, and the Zardari government has imposed an unofficial moratorium on capital punishment. But the judge who sentenced him, Pervez Ali Shah, faces perhaps shorter odds," it added.
Judges who rule the "wrong" way on blasphemy face immense dangers in Pakistan, the paper said, pointing out that reporters at Qadri's hearing on Saturday noted that the judge slipped from the courtroom via the back door.
"He knows he is a marked man. Now only time will tell if the discredited Pakistani state can stand up for at least one good man," the paper added. (ANI)
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