A Lahore anti-terrorism court has sentenced a man to death for the murder of 19-year-old TikTok star Ayesha Tufail. The ruling is being hailed as a landmark, a decisive blow against the culture of violence that festers beneath the surface of Pakistan’s digital youth revolution. But let us not be fooled by the theatre of justice.
This is a spectacle, not a solution. A single hanging will not undo the rot of a society that lionises fame while hating the famous, that fetishises honour while slaughtering the honourable. Ayesha Tufail’s crime was not her TikTok videos; it was her visibility in a culture that demands women be seen but not heard, admired but not autonomous.
The murderer, a jilted admirer no doubt nurtured by the same patriarchal bile that courses through the nation’s veins, becomes a convenient scapegoat. The state pats itself on the back, the mob gets its bloodlust sated, and the root causes—the toxic masculinity, the misogyny, the state’s own failure to protect its citizens—remain untouched. We have seen this before.
In Victorian England, we hanged pickpockets while the festering slums of London bred new ones. In Rome, we crucified slaves while the empire decayed from within. This verdict is a fig leaf over a festering wound.
The real landmark would be a society where women do not need a death sentence to be safe. But that would require more than a rope. That would require a revolution.
