There is something profoundly disturbing about the way we have begun to discuss crime in Pakistan.
A woman is raped. A child is abducted. A girl disappears. A family waits years for justice. A murder case moves from one hearing to another. A victim’s name becomes a headline for a few days and then the country moves on. And yet, somewhere in the same country, another government official or a politician is making a video.
A road has been inaugurated. A project has been completed. A police initiative has been launched. A few statistics are displayed. A carefully produced social-media video tells us how efficiently a provincial government is working. And then comes the inevitable comparison:
“Look at what we are doing. Look at what the other province is not doing.”
This has become the politics of Pakistan: provinces competing to prove that they are better than one another while ordinary citizens are increasingly desperate for something much more basic: safety.
What good is a beautifully produced development video to a mother whose daughter cannot safely walk home? What does a new road mean to a family whose child has been abducted? What does a political advertisement mean to parents who now have to teach even very young children about dangers that children should never have had to understand? And what does political rivalry matter to a family that has spent years waiting for justice for a murdered loved one?
We have reached a point where crime no longer appears to have an age bracket, a gender boundary or even a limit to human cruelty. Women and girls are assaulted. Children are sexually abused. Infants have become victims of horrific violence. People are abducted. People are murdered. And then we ask: Where is the state? The question is not whether one province is better than another.
The question is: Are Pakistani citizens safe in any province? If the answer is no, then perhaps our politicians should stop behaving as though governance is a provincial cricket match. This is not a competition. Human suffering is not a scoreboard.
A murdered child does not become less dead because another province has built a better road. A rape survivor does not feel safer because a government has released an impressive video. A kidnapped person does not return home because politicians have won an argument on social media.
There is something deeply immature about political leadership that spends more energy proving that the other side is worse than asking why citizens are suffering in the first place. It is the political equivalent of two people standing in a burning building arguing over whose room caught fire first. The building is burning. Put out the fire. Justice cannot be selective. Perhaps the most dangerous message a society can send is not that crime exists. Crime exists everywhere.
The truly dangerous message is that justice may not exist equally for everyone. When ordinary citizens see cases dragging on for years, when families continue waiting for accountability, and when powerful or influential people appear capable of escaping consequences, something far more destructive begins to happen. People lose faith. And once citizens stop believing that the law will protect them, society begins to change. The powerful learn that influence can protect them.
The vulnerable learn that they must protect themselves. Victims become afraid of reporting. Families become afraid of confronting powerful individuals. And perpetrators become increasingly confident. That is how the rule of law begins to collapse, not necessarily with one dramatic event, but through thousands of small acts of impunity. A case delayed for years is not merely a legal inconvenience.
For a victim’s family, delay is another form of suffering. Justice that arrives after years may still be justice, but a system that routinely makes vulnerable people wait indefinitely is asking them to carry their trauma while the machinery of the state moves at its own pace. Stop teaching citizens how to survive the state’s failure. We have become remarkably good at teaching potential victims how to behave. Tell girls what to wear. Tell women where not to go. Tell children not to talk to strangers. Tell families to be careful. Tell parents to monitor their daughters. Tell women not to travel alone. Tell victims to remain silent because reporting may bring shame. But where is the equivalent social campaign directed at perpetrators?
Where is the message that says: Do not commit the crime because the state will find you, prosecute you and punish you? That is the message a functioning justice system should communicate. We cannot build a society around the permanent vigilance of potential victims. A woman should not have to become a security expert simply to live her life. A child should not have to carry the psychological burden of understanding predatory behaviour. Parents should not have to calculate the probability of danger every time their child leaves the house. And women should not have to live as prisoners in order for men who may harm them to remain free.
The responsibility for preventing violence must increasingly shift towards the perpetrator, the justice system and the state, not the potential victim. Governance is not a social-media campaign. There is nothing wrong with governments communicating their achievements. But there is something deeply wrong when communication begins to substitute for governance.
The real test is what happens after a crime occurs. Does the police investigation work? Does evidence disappear? Does political influence interfere? Does the victim receive protection? Does the case move? Does the accused face trial? Does the victim’s family receive justice? And ultimately: Does the law mean what it says? That is governance. Everything else is presentation. Our politicians need to grow up. Mature leadership does not celebrate its own province while mocking another province’s failures. Mature leadership sees a rape case in another province and asks: “What weakness in our own system allows this to happen?” It sees a powerful accused person escaping accountability and asks: “What must we change so that power cannot purchase impunity?” That is leadership.
Pakistan needs a political culture in which the death, rape or disappearance of an ordinary citizen is treated as a national failure and not merely tomorrow’s news cycle. It is time for our governments to stop looking across provincial borders long enough to look into the eyes of their own citizens. Stop making everything a political victory. Stop turning tragedy into propaganda. Stop competing over who looks better. Compete instead over who can make people safer. Because the true measure of a government is not the number of cameras pointed at it. It is the number of citizens who can sleep at night without fear. And right now, far too many Pakistanis are not sleeping peacefully. They are waiting. Waiting for their daughters to come home. Waiting for their children to be safe. Waiting for missing loved ones. Waiting for cases to move. Waiting for justice. And perhaps most painfully of all, waiting for the people they elected to finally understand that governing is not about looking powerful.
It is about protecting the powerless.