Pakistan’s blasphemy law has claimed its first Bollywood victim.
On Nov. 26, a court in Gilgit, Pakistan, sentenced Mir Shakil ur-Rehman — the owner of Geo TV, the country’s largest media group — Bollywood star Veena Malik, her husband Asad Malik and television host Shayesta Lodhi to 26-year prison terms for violating multiple blasphemy provisions of the country’s penal code.
The court based its conviction on a Geo TV skit aired on May 14 starring Veena Malik that re-enacted her wedding, while drawing an explicit parallel with the wedding ceremony of the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter.
Just 10 days later, police launched an investigation into blasphemy allegations against pop star turned preacherJunaid Jamshed stemming from an online video in which Jamshed allegedly disparages one of theProphet Muhammad’s wives.
But Jamshed, Malik and her high profile co-defendants should consider themselves fortunate. Unlike far too many of those accused of blasphemy in Pakistan, they are still alive.
On Nov. 4, an angry mob attacked a Christian couple, Shama and Shahzad Masih, in Kot Radha Kishan in Punjab for suspected blasphemy. The couple was savagely beaten and then burned to death in a brick kiln. The next day, a police officer in Gujrat, also in Punjab, decapitated a mentally unstable man who was in custody in the city’s police station for allegedly committing blasphemy. In September police opened fire on an elderly British-Pakistani man imprisoned on blasphemy charges, wounding him.
In today’s Pakistan, an accusation of blasphemy can be a death sentence.
Such incidents are becoming tragically routine. On March 9, 2013, police stood by while a thousand-strong mob, ostensibly enraged by blasphemy allegations against Sawan Masih, a Christian sanitation worker, attacked his residential community of Joseph’s Colony in Lahore. The crowd looted and then burned down more than 150 houses as the police stood by without intervening. The Punjab provincial government has failed to bring any perpetrators to justice. Adding insult to injury, while courts failed to convict any of his assailants, Masih was later sentenced to death for blasphemy.
Pakistan’s blasphemy law, as section 295-C of the penal code is known, is the root of these gross abuses. Hundreds are held every year for various offenses under other similar statutes, but 295-C makes the death penalty effectively mandatory for transgressions that fall under its scope.
To date there have been no executions yet carried out for it, but at least 19 people in the country are on death row for blasphemy. The law is largely used against members of religious minorities, while the government rarely brings charges against those responsible for attacks on people — often the victims of personal disputes — accused of blasphemy.
.jpg)
