By Raza Ruman
No end of Qadri? The list of Qadri’s lovers is unending. The latest who cursed Nawaz government for hanging Qadri is right wing journalist Ansar Abbasi. Abbasi wrote a passionate column in Daily Jang and cursed the PML-N government for hanging Qadri. Although media as a whole did not cover the hanging episode but some anchors and journalists including Harron Rasheed and Orya Maqbool Jaan were upset seeing their hero goes to gallows.
Mumtaz Qadri was executed on Monday, Feb 29, 2016. The hanging took place at 4:30am at Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, where Qadri had been imprisoned over the past several years.
Abbasi said he met a top functionary of the Nawaz government and pleaded to pardon Qadri but his effort could not bear the fruit.
Qadri’s death came a little over five years and a month after he assassinated Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer outside a coffee shop in Islamabad. According to the authorities, Qadri had confessed to the murder, saying he had done it because the governor had wished to reform Pakistan’s blasphemy law. At the time, authorities also insisted that his was the act of a lone assassin and that there was no connection with any militant organisation.
In the grim present, where Pakistan and Pakistanis have been subjected to thousands of such acts of death which produce thousands more deaths, there are some additional risks when death is attached to an individual such as Qadri. The cult of suicide bombings against the Pakistani state considers those killed in the path of killing others as martyrs. In this case, the fact that the state itself carried out the killing can attach even more significance to Qadri’s end, anoint him even further in the eyes of those who have managed to attach divine significance to such acts.
It is an invocation to all who will listen to become Mumtaz Qadri. Sadly, there are millions that listen and among those millions are some thousands that silently sympathise and some hundreds that actively join the rosters of militant organisations. Death, the embrace of it, the imposition of it on innocent others, is central to this conversion. -Pak Destiny
