Has Pakistans President Pervez Musharraf “gone nuts”?
Mukhtar Mai – says the government has taken her passport That was the view forcibly expressed this week in the prestigious New York Times. Ordinarily, asking such a thing about the West’s favourite ally – and that too a Muslim leader armed with an agenda of “enlightened moderation” – would perhaps amount to unwarranted insolence. But it suddenly seems to have become the predominant query in the minds of Pakistan watchers from Canberra to Washington. The case in point? The treatment meted out to Mukhtar Mai, the gutsy woman from a rural backwater who turned her gang rape into a gripping real life tale of a struggle against a criminal justice system in a state of deep rot. Three years after she was allegedly gang raped on the orders of a rural council as punishment for a crime attributed to her brother, Ms Mai (also known as Mukhtaran Mai) has made headlines again. And some feel the circumstances now are no less distressing than the one that first propelled her to the attention of the in
