The consequences of suspected blasphemy have been almost criminally hideous in Pakistan, but Sunday’s lynching of a middle-aged mentally challenged man for allegedly bowdlerizing the Quran and setting its pages on fire has ignited outrage across the nation to the west of the Radcliffe Line.

In death, Mushtaq Ahmed symbolizes the degree to which the clock has been turned back in course of the journey to Imran Khan’s Naya Pakistan. The horrendous comeuppance in Khanewal district of Punjab province has prompted the Prime Minister to be explicit on his pledge to declare that the “culprits involved in the lynching will be dealt with full severity of the law and along with police officials who have failed in their duty”.

Notable also must be the failure of the judiciary, on occasion as pivotal a player at the national level as the military and the legislature. Mushtaq was stoned to death and his body hung from a tree by a mob, which palpably was in the vanguard in the absence of the law-enforcement authorities and the courts. That retreat is still more glaring in the country’s predominant province of Punjab. Kangaroo justice ought to be anathema to the certitudes of the proposed Naya Pakistan. And yet the triumph of such justice was evident from macabre drama that preceded visuals of relatives carrying the body of Mushtaq for the last rites.

Far from the intervention of the provincial administration, an announcement informed those who had assembled for Maghrib (Friday evening prayers) that a man had desecrated the Quran. Though the police had been deployed in the village before the incident, the mob outnumbered the force. The victim was tied to a tree, after which he was lynched to death. He had claimed innocence, but the villagers hit him with bricks till he died. Two policemen, who had tried to bring the body down from the tree, were grievously injured when the mob began throwing stones at them.

The hideous travesty of justice, inflicted by a furious mob, with scant regard for the rule of law, not to forget the certitudes of democracy, does not inspire optimism. Imran Khan’s signal of intent against the police is well-taken, and still more in a province that has witnessed the killing of Punjab’s Governor by his security guard on a charge of blasphemy. It is the fundamental canker of injustice that direly needs to be addressed in a country where the killing of a Governor was followed by the persecution of a teenaged girl (by the mullahs) for allegedly violating the tenets of Islam.

As often as not, punishment for the accused is not substantiated by the due process of law. Enlightened as he might claim to be, Pakistan’s Prime Minister ought now to deal with the fallout of religious offence, perceived or otherwise.