The arithmetic is not complicated. Nine hundred and twenty-four citizens killed by a single police unit in eight months. Two officers died in the same period. When the ratio of the killed to the killers approaches five hundred to one, we are no longer discussing policing. We are discussing execution by institutional design.
Pakistan's Punjab province — governed by a democratically elected chief minister under a constitutional mandate called "Safe Punjab" has produced this figure through its Crime Control Department.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan's February 17 fact-finding report has now confirmed in forensic detail what the numbers already announced: suspects on motorcycles, moving suspiciously, firing first, then dying while voluntarily narrating their criminal histories to officers who had just shot them. The HRCP identifies this as "copy-paste structuring." The colder, more accurate term is a bureaucratic template for killing with institutional deniability engineered into every line.
Anatol Lieven, in Pakistan: A Hard Country, described the Pakistani state as Janus-faced capable of performing constitutional legitimacy while simultaneously deploying violence as a governing instrument. What Punjab's CCD represents is not an aberration from that structure. It is its logical endpoint. Ayesha Siddiqa documented in Military Inc. how Pakistan's security apparatus built economic and political interests that depended on impunity.
Aqil Shah's The Army and Democracy showed how those interests hollowed out judicial accountability across decades. What Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz has done is domesticate that architecture into civilian policing — bringing the encounter template from the counterinsurgency theatre into urban Punjab and calling it crime control.
Madiha Afzal demonstrated in Pakistan Under Siege that regressive institutional frameworks, once normalised, do not self-correct. They are defended by the very statistics they manipulate. Crime numbers in Punjab may have improved. That improvement — if real — was purchased at a price no constitutional order can legitimately pay.
Ahmed Rashid documented in Pakistan on the Brink how security forces across Punjab repeatedly criminalised the innocent to meet operational targets. Every fabricated FIR in the CCD's current dossier follows precisely that pattern.
The central argument requires no qualification: no government, elected or otherwise, may substitute accusation for conviction and call it justice. Due process is not procedural inconvenience. It is the only mechanism separating constitutional governance from organised state violence.
Zubaida Bibi lost five family members in a single night and was threatened into silence when she asked for accountability. That silence — institutionally enforced — is not a by-product of this system. It is the system's primary product.
For readers in Kashmir, who understand with uncommon clarity what it means when security apparatus operates beyond judicial reach, this story carries its own resonance. The demand is universal: independent judicial inquiry, suspension of the CCD's mandate, forensic audit of every FIR, and post-mortem rights guaranteed to every family.
The rule of law is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the only wall between governance and slaughter. When a state dismantles it — by design, with paperwork, under democratic cover — the wall does not fall quietly. It is removed, brick by brick, in broad daylight.
(The Author is Consulting Editor; Rising Kashmir)
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