Justice and Sister Mai..

It has been posited that perhaps the best way to deal with the injustices against Mai is to have foreign pressure, in particular from the US, applied to Pakistan.

What better way to embarrass the officials in charge than to parade Ms. Mai and provoke enough outrage that Pakistani officials would have no choice but to take (the appropriate) action to save face. The idea here is that in the absence of this kind of activism, the government will simply (as usual) make a perpetrator out of the victim.

Not a good idea.

Although I cannot condone the government’s response to her plight, let’s get real here.
A public campaign in a foreign country will malign the entire nation, not just the government. Rightly or wrongly, at BEST we can only expect justice under duress...and even then only in this one case.

I am not so cynical to think that the only way things will change is if we solicit the aid of a bunch of foreigners to breathe down our necks. Ms. Mai’s fight is at home, and it’s every Pakistani’s duty to support her. But this idea of parading her about just doesn’t cut it.

Pakistanis need to rely on THEIR outrage and to act on it. Chasing justice by any means will only deepen the cynicism with respect to their own society that plagues the Pakistani mind.