Originally published on Substack.com by S.A. Khan. Republished here with full permission. You may read original article here.
In the gilded chamber of Court 14 at the Royal Courts of Justice, history bore witness to a perverse inversion: Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, that gargantuan beast fed on the plundered wealth of a bleeding nation, marshaled its might against a single man; Adil Farooq Raja, retired Major of the very army whose scheming generals now sought his annihilation.
The air hung thick with the irony of empire: in these halls where colonial rulers once judged the colonized, a post-colonial state now deployed stolen riches to silence its soldier in exile. Raja, though navigating the arcane rituals of British law with the unease of an outsider, stood unbent. His replies to the prosecution’s onslaught, a barrage financed by Islamabad’s deep coffers, cut with the precision of a regimental dagger: eloquent, unwavering, steeped in the dignity his accusers had long bartered away.
What a grotesque spectacle unfolded. An intelligence apparatus forged to dismantle terror networks and foreign infiltrators instead squandered its vanishing legitimacy; and the people’s ransom, hounding a veteran guilty only of bearing witness.
While Baloch insurgents ambushed and hunted the ill equipped soldiers, suicide bombers tore through mosques, and death squads ghosted through Karachi’s alleyways, the ISI’s gaze fixed obsessively on this lone voice in London.
No, Adil Raja never kidnapped children, never bombed markets, never extorted merchants. His crime was truth, and to a junta drunk on fear, truth is treason.
The farce descended into menace on Tuesday, the 22nd of July. During the luncheon recess, shadows detached themselves from the court’s Corinthian pillars: hired thugs, their whispers like poison, slithered among witnesses in the smoke-hazed corridors. Their intimidation; a vulgar defilement of British justice, was but the regime’s signature scrawled in real time.
When the honorable judge resumed his bench, the violation was laid bare: the Pakistani state’s thuggery had breached the temple of law. In New Delhi, silent spectators at RAW’s lair surely permitted themselves a glacial smile. The ISI; tasked with checking India’s ascent, now cowered like a sewer rat, trembling at the footfall of a pensioner armed only with conviction. This theater of persecution, this squandering of a nation’s soul in a foreign courtroom, collapsed upon Raja’s fortitude as utterly as Operation Sindoor’s recent ruin.
A spy service built to crush insurgencies now gnawed at its own bones.
A state that hunts its soldiers in the empire’s own courts has confessed its hollowness. For in the end, the echoing tread of one unbroken man resonates louder than the death rattle of tyrants.
Tyrants forget: when you make exiles of your best, you arm the world with your shame.
…Concluded.
Tailpiece…
A Grotesque Masquerade in the Halls of Justice: A farcical spectacle unfolded in the corridors of London’s royal courts; one that Britain, in its indulgence, permitted to fester. The ISI’s handpicked envoys, flanked by the likes of PML-N’s Nasir Butt and a retinue of regime loyalists (among them, brash women of shrill affectation and men of boorish demeanor), transformed the solemnity of justice into a gaudy carnival. Their theatrics, dripping with desperation, were not mere impropriety but a calculated defilement, staged to prop up a flimsy defamation suit against Adil Raja, the dissenting gentleman who, under the weight of his conscience, refuses to kneel.
Rascals; rogues; freebooters; low-caliber men of straw, alien to dignity, honor, or self-restraint; these self-styled guardians of Pakistan’s honor, cantonment-dwelling puppeteers, boot-licking sycophants, stooping lickspittles, lurched through the halls and corridors of the Royal Courts of Justice like specters of a bygone barbarism. With their raucous outbursts and uncouth posturing, they served as a living testament that men of low intellect and debased spirit still shamble across the modern world: relics of an unenlightened age.
And Britain? It watched; it tolerated; it allowed its venerable halls, steeped in centuries of jurisprudence, to be profaned by their vulgar charade. The echoes of their clamor lingered… a stain upon the marble and the majesty of the law.
