On Friday, the chief minister of Punjab shared a video of an accused man under police detention being slapped by the petrol-pump worker he is alleged to have assaulted. The worker works at a pump in Lahore’s Jubilee Town. According to reports, the accused, a customer, attacked him after he asked the man to stop smoking; police traced him through his car and arrested him. The video shows the attendant hitting him hard. Maryam Nawaz described the arrest as ‘a tight slap in the face of those entitled, spoiled brats’ and wrote that justice is the right of every citizen, not a privilege of the rich.
In Multan, a 15-year-old orphan, Waseem Abbas, was run over, allegedly on purpose, by the contractor he worked for. On Tuesday a magistrate gave police four days’ physical remand of the contractor, Tauqeer Nazir. By Wednesday, police said, he had escaped custody and been killed near Bahawalpur in an exchange of fire with the Crime Control Department (CCD), hit by his own accomplice’s bullets. Nobody has explainedhow a man on court-ordered remand travelled from Multan to Bahawalpur. The day before, lawyers had allegedly beaten him inside the Multan court.
In Islamabad, the main suspect in the fraud case behind Laiba Ijaz’s suicide died of gunshot wounds that police attributed to his accomplices. Hina Pervaiz Butt, a PML-N legislator, then wrote that this was Maryam Nawaz’s government, where ‘justice is served immediately’. She deleted the post and called it a personal opinion, and the information minister said that the chief minister had ordered no encounters. There is no public evidence of such an order, and the argument here does not depend on one. It depends on incentives, which show in what officials choose to praise.
The anger has a basis in the numbers. A UNDP report on inequality estimated that the privileges enjoyed by Pakistan’s powerful groups (the corporate sector, large landowners, the political class and the military) were worth about $17.4 billion a year, roughly six percent of GDP. The richest one percent held nine percent of national income; the poorest one percent held 0.15 percent. In Transparency International Pakistan’s 2025 survey, 24 percent named the police the most corrupt sector in the country and 34 percent said so in Punjab, where 70 percent also reported distrusting the provincial government. The World Justice Project ranked Pakistan 130th of 143 countries on the rule of law. A citizen who believes the rich are treated differently at the police station has reasons for thinking so.
Why does a state that can trace a suspect through his car and arrest him quickly need years to convict anyone? Much of the answer lies in the courts and the prosecution. Pending cases in district courts have passed two million, and the Law and Justice Commission counts 1,153 district courts idle for want of judges, 808 of them in Punjab, where 648 civil and family judge posts are also vacant. Punjab’s conviction rate in 2024 was 38 percent, or 96,962 convictions in 256,210 decided cases. In rape cases, Punjab Police figures for the first ten months of that year show 178 convictions against 2,921 acquittals. Even when the state is itself the accused the system tends to stall: after a trial that ran five years, all 18 accused in the killing of Naqeebullah Mehsud, former SSP Rao Anwar among them, were acquitted for want of evidence. A retired senior police officer told Al Jazeera that court delays and weak prosecutions breed the frustration that makes shortcuts look legitimate.
It is tempting to attribute the applause to an uninformed public, but the figures do not support that. About 44.7 percent of Pakistanis live below the World Bank’s $4.20-a-day line, and 22.5 percent below the national poverty line; Punjab has 75.5 million registered voters. Shandana Khan Mohmand’s study of rural elections describes voters who weigh their interests with care, not voters who are easily fooled. Nor do people appear to reject the courts as institutions: in Gallup Pakistan’s 2023 poll, approval of the courts stood at 56 percent, two points above the police. What has worn out is patience with the calendar. A politician who offers a verdict this week to people who have been promised one for years will be cheered.
These episodes differ in their details but share a premise: that punishment which is quick and visible amounts to justice. The anger that gives the premise its force is justified. The diagnosis attached to it is mistaken, and the remedy falls hardest on the people it claims to serve.
The same caption would have been defensible after a conviction. Had the man been tried and sentenced, the chief minister could have called the verdict a slap in the face of everyone who thinks money buys exemption, and most readers would have agreed. What she celebrated came earlier, before any court had weighed evidence, and the sanction was delivered by the complainant rather than a judge. Neither the powerful nor the weak may carry out the law with their own hands. The Constitution promises every citizen treatment in accordance with law (Article 4), security of person (Article 9), a fair trial (Article 10A) and the inviolability of dignity (Article 14), and in the Zaryab Khan case last November the Supreme Court held that the state must prevent custodial violence and killings. Somebody also held up a phone inside that custody. It is not known who, or whether the slap was planned, and nothing published suggests that it was. The government, whose chief minister’s account posted the footage, is in a position to answer both questions.
When custody is not controlled, crowds draw their own conclusions. In June 2024 a mob in Madyan, Swat, broke into a police station, killed a man held over an allegation of blasphemy and burned the building. Multan this month was a smaller version of the same failure: an accused man allegedly beaten in a courtroom and dead within a day. Max Weber defined the state as the body that claims a monopoly of legitimate force, and force becomes legitimate through procedure: a charge, evidence, a judge, an appeal. Without the procedure the force remains, under another name.
Calls for reform in general have changed little, so the proposals here are narrow, each tied to a gap in the figures above. Custody is the obvious place to start. Tauqeer Nazir was in police hands on a magistrate’s order on Tuesday and dead on Wednesday. Any escape, injury or death of an accused during court-ordered remand should trigger an inquiry by a sessions judge from outside the district, reporting within 14 days, with the officers in charge suspended meanwhile. It should also lead to a case under the 2022 Torture and Custodial Death Act, and here the gap can be measured: by 30 April 2026 the Federal Investigation Agency, the investigator under that law, had opened 364 inquiries nationwide, 266 of them in Punjab, and registered 52 criminal cases, only 19 of them from Punjab. The rules to operate the Act were approved in November 2025, and the agency says it lacks staff and money. A funded Punjab unit, and a deadline of seven days between a finding of custodial death and the registration of an FIR, would be a start.
Information is another gap. HRCP asked Punjab Police for data on encounter procedures and received none. Within 30 days of any death in police action, the police should place the FIR, postmortem, ballistic report and weapon-discharge log before a sessions judge, which is the scrutiny that sections 174 and 176 of the Code of Criminal Procedure already envisage, as a Dawn editorial has noted, and the province should publish a district-wise monthly tally. HRCP’s other demands, an independent civilian oversight commission and compensation for families, belong in the same package. Until such a register exists, its call for a moratorium on encounter operations is the position that best fits Article 9.
Trials are slower still, and Pakistan already has a precedent for faster ones. The information minister said on television that, with CCTV footage, a court could have sentenced the Multan suspect. In their first year, 2019–20, 442 model courts decided 145,086 cases, among them 12,075 murder trials, with murder trials finishing in about 30 days; they did it by refusing adjournments and making witnesses appear. Punjab could revive that design for killings backed by video or eyewitness evidence, starting at district headquarters, and fill the posts behind its 808 idle courts so that ordinary dockets stop absorbing the strain.
The CCD’s own record should also be public. The information minister says the department has arrested hundreds, perhaps thousands, of criminals and that the public should look at those prosecuted and punished as well. That can be shown: for every case the CCD has investigated since April 2025, the number challaned, convicted and acquitted, and the months each took. A high rate would weaken the case for encounters. A low rate would place the fault in prosecution, which is where money is needed. Punjab’s overall 38 percent, and 178 convictions against 2,921 acquittals in rape cases, are the numbers to beat.