When Courts Sleep… the Gun Awakens
By: Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada
“The law is blind”, this phrase is no longer confined to the pages of legal textbooks. It has become ingrained in our collective consciousness. But over time, we have learned that the law is not just blind; it can also be so weary that instead of opening its eyes, it drifts into slumber. And when the law sleeps, justice adopts another language, a language that requires neither argument nor evidence, nor even a lawyer. That language is the language of the bullet: silent, but conclusive.
In a narrow street of Kasur, a little girl was playing, a child whose age was synonymous with innocence. Suddenly, a shadow loomed over her. It didn’t merely block the light, it cast a deep, scarring imprint of sorrow and fury upon every soul. A predator, too vile to be called human, laid his hand upon her dream. The scream that followed didn’t just echo in that alley; it reverberated through the conscience of an entire society. That moment was captured by the unblinking lens of a camera, broadcast across social media, and watched by millions who held their breath.
What happened next was not ordinary. According to the police, they arrived, and the same young man, Nasir Wattoo, who had fled after committing his act of barbarity, was intercepted on Kasur’s Dhanpat Road during yet another attempted assault. In a bid to escape arrest, he drew his pistol. And that “accidental” shot hit precisely where his intent had sprouted, from the root of his perversion. The bullet struck his genitals, ripping through not just flesh, but his lust, his pride, and his predatory claim to manhood.
When the news surfaced in the media, someone from Sindh quipped sarcastically, “Has Punjab also started the ‘Half Fry’ and ‘Full Fry’ culture?”
Someone else mourned, “This is excessive force.”
And another, head bowed, simply said, “This is justice. It didn’t echo… but it hit where it was needed.”
This wasn’t the first time. Before this, such phrases echoed across the land of Sindh. “Half Fry and Full Fry”, a police culture where criminals were either shot in the legs to be crippled for life or killed in staged encounters. This was reserved for habitual offenders, those who repeatedly escaped court convictions but continued to stab society with crimes. They were thieves, robbers, kidnappers, murderers, faces the courts couldn’t prove guilty, but society knew all too well.
Now, those echoes have reached Punjab. In a recent hearing, a high court judge asked the Punjab police why, in every police encounter, only the suspect dies and no officer is ever harmed. A valid question, yet perhaps it came too late. Because today, the public no longer awaits verdicts from courtrooms; they seek truth in video footage, and measure justice by the direction of a bullet.
To say we support lawlessness would be wrong. But we must say this, when the law becomes the defense counsel for the criminal and offers only consolation to the victim, then the gun must speak. And when it does, it doesn’t just spill blood, it delivers a message: “The justice system has failed.”
This piece is not born of rage, but of reflection. Why have we reached this point? Why is society now content with the bullet as justice? Because for years we knocked on courtroom doors and all we heard was the echo of delays. Justice remained absent. So when a daughter screamed, and justice stayed silent as before, the gun spoke. And the justice that is usually buried in files was, this time, delivered by the trigger of a uniformed officer, judge, jury, and executioner in one.
And now the question isn’t whether this was right or wrong. The real question is, how did we get here? To a place where people call a police bullet “relief”? Where a father’s tear moves the finger of a policeman before it stirs a judge?
What happened in Kasur might be deemed excessive by the standards of legal theory. But what was the real culprit? A justice system that cannot decide for years. Courts that repeatedly free criminals. Police stations that ask for recommendations before registering a complaint. It is from the womb of this failed system that such bullets are born. These bullets don’t just tear through flesh, they rupture the patience of a society.
This was the moment when a child’s body was assaulted, but the answer came not from the law, but from a gun. It was a moment when justice was mute, society was helpless, and the actual law… lay asleep. Then someone entrusted with enforcing the law picked up a gun, and rewrote the very definition of justice.
This wasn’t a scene from a film. This was reality, sharp, silent, and agonizingly real.
The conclusion is not that a bullet was fired. The conclusion is, we had to wait for that bullet.
Because when a daughter screams and the courts remain asleep, then justice blazes at the tip of a gun, speaking in silence. That moment does not merely instill fear, it holds up a mirror. A mirror in which the state, the system, and our conscience stand exposed and bare.
If we still do not think, act, or reform, then tomorrow, the bullet will not just be the language of justice, it will become the identity of the state.
