The Accused: Damned or Devoted? BBC4, Monday at 10pm
Political rallies are a little bit different in Pakistan.
“We are not here for votes,” Khadim Hussain Rizvi told the huge crowd. “We are here to get some heads chopped.”
The cleric and leader of the TLP religious party was on the brink of revolution after the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Asia Bibi for blasphemy.
Blasphemy remains a crime in Northern Ireland and has only recently been removed from the Republic’s constitution but it is of a different order in Pakistan.
In Ireland the law has effectively been ignored, while there have been 15,000 cases of blasphemy in Pakistan in the last 35 years.
Asia Bibi was the most high profile case. A Christian from a village outside Lahore she was accused of insulting the prophet in a row over water. In 2010 she was sentenced to death.
Her defenders argue that the blasphemy laws are often used to oppress minorities. While 40 per cent of cases are against non-Muslims, they make up just three per cent of the population.
Pro-blasphemy law campaigners argue that minorities use the blasphemy laws to get notoriety and seek asylum abroad.
It seems unlikely. Often the punishment for perceived blasphemy is swift.
Mashal Khan was beaten to death in his university in 2017 by an angry mob after he was accused of blasphemy. His supporters said he was falsely accused because he was making a nuisance of himself by criticising the mis-management of the university and seeking reform.
Patras Masih remains in jail fighting a blasphemy case after being accused in 2018 of having offensive material on his phone.
The Accused: Damned or Devoted? accompanied the village imam as he showed us the Masih house and assured us that the mob did not want to attack the Christian area. “We only wanted to kill the blasphemer,” he said.
Nevertheless, the police said they were unable to protect the area and the Christian population of the enclave fled. Masih’s father wept as he told how he had put everything he had into building the family home.
Bibi, who was the subject of significant international attention, was eventually allowed to leave the country and began a new life in Canada in May last year.
In the 2018 election the TLP emerged as the fifth largest party, in no small part because of the Bibi case.
At the rally following the Supreme Court decision, the co-founder of TLP Afzal Qadri called for the murder of the judges.
"The judges have to be killed," he told the crowd. "Either their security guards, their cooks, their drivers have to kill them."
It was a terrifying reference to the murder of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer by his own security guard in 20011 after Taseer had called for a pardon for Bibi.
There's little we can do to affect this, but perhaps the removal of our own blasphemy laws would be a start.
***
Tigers: Hunting the Traffickers, BBC 2, Wednesday at 9pm
It’s an interesting moral question. If it is appropriate to farm cows, horses and sheep, then is it OK to farm big cats?
The demand for Tiger bones for Chinese medicine has driven a trade in the illegal killing and trafficking of the big cats, but now the crime gangs have moved on and are running their own Tiger breeding programmes.
These seem to be concentrated in Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. The latter two having easy access to the Chinese market.
Intrinsically we know that farming these magnificent creatures is wrong and reporter Aldo Kane exposed how the criminals are hiding the Tigers in plain sight - in closed areas of these countries zoos.
