One day
I would like to take
Both my hands
(For I consider life
Itself too dear to lose)
Dip them in Petrol
Then set them alight
With a candle flame
And dedicate them
To those who acted
While I wept and wrote.
-Maimed Jam
So it happened. Someone rose to make his ultimate protest. Knowing how his people wept, 66-year-old John Joseph, a Roman Catholic Bishop for 17 years, shot himself to death. He was one among the protestors of Pakistan´s tyrannical blasphemy laws. He was engaged with others like him to push the protest to its ultimate limits but mere opposition was of no use. The state authorities would not budge one bit. The pressure of fundamentalism was at its height.
What the protestors asked for was what people in most countries had and took for granted. They asked that the country´s blasphemy laws incorporated in the penal code be removed and with it the unjust discrimination against the non-Muslim.