Loophole closed
LAHORE: A First Information Report (FIR) registered against the nominated killers of social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch was transformed into a non-compoundable FIR on Monday, police said, making it impossible for Qandeel’s family to pardon her killers.
A senior police officer investigating the case told Dawn that Sections 311 and 305 of the Pakistan Penal Code had been added to the FIR.
Advocate Balak Shair Khosa, while talking to Dawn, said the addition of these sections was a welcome step.
“There cannot be an agreement [after this]. These sections were created to end karo-kari. Now that they have added them to the FIR, the victim’s family cannot forgive the killers as the state has become a complainant. It will be taken as a murder against the state.”
No doubt angry Islamists will take to the streets to protest this outrage.
Qandeel, who was a model and an actress, was strangled to death in her house in Multan’s Karimabad area in the early hours of Saturday. Her father claimed that she was killed by her younger brother, Waseem, in the name of honour.
Waseem, accompanied by police, confessed in a press conference that he had drugged and strangled his sister, adding that the motive behind the murder was that “she brought dishonour to the Baloch name” due to risque videos and statements that she posted on social media.
It’s interesting that they don’t think murdering a sister can bring dishonour to the Baloch name. It’s interesting that they think twerking is a capital crime while murder is an honorable good deed. It’s interesting that love just doesn’t come into it at all – the basic norm that family members should love each other, at least enough not to murder a sister for being sexy on Twitter. The whole warped morality gives such a hideous, bleak picture of life in such a family.
H/t Artymorty
They didn’t love her enough not to force her into a marriage with someone she didn’t want, who was awful to her.
I wonder what kind of cultural factors cause this kind of thing? It’s at play, too, in the US, where parents beat and throw out kids for being gay, or where they blame a child for being molested by a priest/pastor. RWA, for one thing. But are there other things, like a sense that they had no choice but to have a child (who they might not have actually wanted)?
It feels like this is a kind of failure to be human. Failure to Mammal properly, in fact. Children should matter more than reputation.
We could recover our humanity by shining the bright light of publicity under the rocks where these failures live; not just when their victim is famous, but in all cases.
We, and the media, could also help by refusing to use the phrase ‘honour killing’, even in scare quotes.
We should refer to such appalling actions as dishonourable, cowardly murder. All three words, always.
And always label the perpetrators as dishonourable, cowardly murderers and their supporters within the family as dishonourable, cowardly failures.
Wider society is responsible for deciding what actions are perceived as ‘bringing shame’ on a family; wider society has to step up to the plate and take action.