On the morning of August 21, a 49-year-old man felt for the edges of a battered weighing scale, the way he did every day, and made his way toward Model Town Park in Lahore. Blind since childhood, Nadeem Masih had found a modest way to live with dignity—charging petty merchants a few rupees to weigh their goods, surviving on tips from kind strangers, and stretching each day’s earnings to feed an aging mother and siblings who depended on him.
By nightfall, he was no longer a vendor but a prisoner—booked under Section 295-C of Pakistan’s Penal Code, the most severe of the blasphemy provisions, which mandates death for insulting the Prophet Muhammad. The irony is unbearable: a man who cannot see is now forced to imagine the gallows.
According to his mother, nearly 80-year-old Martha Yousaf, the cruelty began long before the charge. She says a park parking contractor, Waqas Mazhar, and other workers regularly harassed Nadeem—extorting money, throwing water on him, rifling his pockets for the small kindnesses strangers had left there. Sometimes, she says, they took “loans” they never intended to repay. On that August morning, when Nadeem came to set up his scale, they allegedly blocked him. When he protested, they beat him, forced him onto a motorcycle, and delivered him not to a supervisor or an elder—but to a police station, along with an accusation that can end a life.
Some details land like a blow to the chest. Nadeem has an iron rod in his right leg. He depends not just on a walking stick but on the willingness of the world to make room for him. Inside the jail, his mother says, he was made to confess. “He cried bitterly as he told me how the police had mercilessly beaten him and forced him to admit to the false charge,” Martha recalls. “Every time I meet him, my heart bleeds… They push him around despite knowing that he is completely blind.”
For Martha, grief is not theoretical. She buried one son. Her husband has passed. One of her daughters—divorced and living with her—cleans other people’s homes to keep the family’s head above water. “Every day I pray to God to deliver my son from this false accusation and bring him back to me,” she says, her voice carrying the weight of poverty, disability, widowhood, and fear.
Nadeem’s attorney, Javed Sahotra, says the case file itself strains under contradiction. The First Information Report claims a police team learned of the alleged blasphemy at 11 p.m., inside a public park whose gates, by the park’s own rules, close at 9 p.m. Hours before that—at 6 a.m.—Nadeem had phoned the police helpline to report he was being mistreated by the same men now accusing him. Sahotra has asked the Model Town police superintendent to produce the sub-inspector’s call data records to verify where he was at the time of the supposed offense. “If the trial court does not grant bail, we will move the Lahore High Court,” he says. He also confirms Nadeem’s account of custodial torture: “It is very unfortunate that a blind person was subjected to such inhumane treatment.”
This is not just a story about one man. It is a window into a system that too often rewards the loudest accuser and punishes the most vulnerable. Pakistan’s National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) has condemned the arrest. Its executive director, Naeem Yousaf, frames Nadeem’s ordeal within a wider social failing: “Already burdened by poverty, blindness and social cruelty, he is now suffering even more behind the bars of a jail cell, a victim of injustice and human indifference.”
Human Rights Watch, in a June 9 report, described how blasphemy allegations are frequently weaponized—to settle business rivalries, to grab property, to terrorize minorities. Vague definitions and a culture of impunity transform rumor into prosecution, prosecution into mob frenzy, and mob frenzy into silence from those who should speak. Police officers who try to intervene risk threats themselves; political or religious figures who inflame tensions often escape consequences. The result is a climate where a blind man’s body becomes a ledger on which the strong can write their grudges.
What does “due process” mean to someone like Nadeem? Imagine the journey from cell to courtroom: the shouted orders he can’t place, the shoves he can’t predict, the faces he cannot read for mercy. Imagine being told your words—words you may not have said—carry the weight of death. Imagine knowing the very law that should shield your dignity has become a weapon pressed to your throat.
And yet, within this darkness, there are stubborn threads of human goodness. There is a mother who keeps going to the prison even though every visit breaks her heart. There is a sister who scrubs floors and cooks other people’s meals so the family can buy soap, pay bus fare, and hire a lawyer for one more hearing. An attorney is combing through call logs and gate-closing times, insisting that facts still matter in a world bent out of shape by fear. Some strangers once put a few extra notes in Nadeem’s pocket because he was blind—and may now find it in themselves to raise their voices because he is human.
Nadeem’s story challenges us to ask hard questions. What does justice look like when truth is overrun by accusation? What becomes of faith when the laws written in its name are used to humiliate the weak? How do we measure a society’s soul—by the vigor of its condemnations, or by the gentleness it extends to those who cannot fight back?
There are practical steps for those within the system: transparent investigations, accountability for custodial abuse, strict penalties for false accusers, and real protections for the accused. But there is also a more basic requirement—one that no statute can manufacture. It is the moral courage to say: not like this. Not to a man who cannot even see your face. Not to a mother who has already buried one child.
When Martha Yousaf leaves the prison after each visit, the day has usually grown heavy. She returns to a small home in Chak No. 9/4L village in Okara District, where faith is not a slogan but a plea whispered into the quiet. Her son, despite blindness and the iron rod in his leg, graduated from college—a fact that should have been a door opener in any decent world. But doors stayed shut. So he stood beside a weighing scale in a public park to keep his family afloat, until men with more power than conscience decided they could use a sacred law for profane ends.
What is the weight of a life? For years, Nadeem measured the worth of fruit and flour, staples and spices. Today, the scale he needs is far larger: the balance of a nation’s promise against the burden of its fears. On one side is a blind man in a crowded cell. On the other is our capacity for empathy, our insistence that justice be more than a word carved into a courthouse lintel.
“He cried bitterly,” his mother says. In that cry echoes the grief of countless others caught beneath the heavy machinery of accusation without evidence, punishment without compassion. It is a sound that should unsettle our sleep and rouse our conscience.
May those who hold power—judges, police, politicians, preachers—hear that cry and feel, if only for a moment, the terror of being led where you cannot see, pushed by hands you cannot identify, condemned by voices you cannot quiet. And may they find, at last, the courage to deliver not a verdict of fear, but an act of mercy.
Bring him home.