Sushant Sareen,
Senior Fellow, VIF
On 22nd September, 2013, two suicide bombers targeted a
church in Peshawar, killing over 80 people and injuring nearly 150.
Entire families were wiped out. Many Christian households, who in any
case barely eke out an existence in a country and society where they are
treated as Untermensch (sub-humans, because they are not Muslims) lost
their sole bread earner. Teachers, students, newly-weds, about to be
married, pregnant women, children (around 20) were blown to bits by the
jihadists fighting for the glory of Islam. Of course, this is neither
the first time such a carnage of minorities has happened in the ‘Land of
the Pure’, nor will it be the last time such a massacre has happened
because if truth be told, an open season has been declared on minorities
in Pakistan. Muslim minority sects, Shias in particular and within the
Shia community, the Hazaras, have routinely come in the cross hairs of
jihadist mass murderers. Other non-Muslim communities too have been
targeted – Hindu girls are a favourite target, Ahmediyas subjected to
the worst kinds of hate crimes, and Christians not only made victims to
the infamous and obnoxious blasphemy laws but also pogroms in which
entire neighbourhoods are burnt by rampaging mobs.
Every time an outrage such as the bombing of the All Saints’ Church
in Peshawar takes place, there is the standard response in Pakistan: the
government wrings its hands helplessly and issues a pro forma
condemnation but does absolutely nothing tangible to prevent such an
incident from being repeated; most politicians also issue similar pro
forma condemnation not because they genuinely feel outraged, but because
that is the politically correct thing to do; other politicians – to
name just the most notorious of this lot, the Taliban defender and
supporter Imran Khan, the flag-bearer of Islamist terror Munawar Hasan
of Jamaat Islami and the Maulana who wants to run the Taliban but is
currently running scared of them, Maulana Fazlur Rehman of JUI-F –
condemn the incident but then make the whole thing sound insincere and
disingenuous by adding qualifications which are really short hand for
not pointing the finger at the real perpetrators but deflecting the
blame to an un-named ‘third force’ or insinuating a ‘foreign hand’
(which though not always specified is often an allusion to the US,
Indian and Israeli intelligence agencies).
The ugly reality is however quite different from the spin that the
self-serving and scared politicians, analysts and strategists give to
gruesome acts of terrorism. A son of Maulana Maudoodi, founder of the
Jamaat Islami, the party that serves as the ‘Mother of political
Islamism’ and is arguably not only one of the political faces of the Al
Qaeda but also partners Imran Khan’s party in running the provincial
government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, hit the nail on the head when he said
that the bombing of the Peshawar church was a natural outcome of
creating a state in the name of religion. But even this is a partial
explanation of the blood lust that drives the jihadists. Pakistan's real
problem isn’t so much that terrorists are running amok, but that
Islamist terrorists are operating with impunity and, to an extent, with
the sanction of state. In other words, more than terrorism, the problem
is societal extremism and a communalised national mindset.
Much as Pakistanis like to explain away extremism in society as
something that was fostered on the country by the Islamisation policies
unleashed by the former military dictator, Gen Zia ul Haq, the fact is
that this mindset has been present since before independence. If
anything, it was this mindset that gave birth to Pakistan, and if there
is no course correction, then this very mindset will probably become the
reason for the death of the state of Pakistan. Terrorism and radicalism
are only the manifestations or symptoms of the deep seated extremist
mindset which has been consciously and deliberately fuelled by the State
through an education system in which children are taught to hate other
communities, rendering most of them incapable of living in peace with
not only non-Muslims but also Muslims who adhere to a different sect or
school of theology.
A recent example of this climate of intolerance was when a news
anchor (infamous for being part of the caretaker setup put in place in
2007 by the then dictator and self-proclaimed ‘enlightened moderate’,
Gen Pervez Musharraf) who started a campaign against an elite Lahore
school because it was teaching comparative religions to students in
order to inculcate tolerance and understanding of other faiths, and the
alacrity and zeal with which the Punjab government headed by Shahbaz
Sharif came down on the school administration and registered cases
against them. In such an environment, bombing of religious places of
‘others’ – Christian churches, Hindu temples, Shia Imambargahs and
Ahmediya masjids – is par for the course.
Yet another example is that of the Blasphemy law. The problem with
the blasphemy law isn’t so much that it is a bad law (which it is) but
the extremism in society. Many places have bad laws or laws that are
anachronistic. For instance, Britain has both an adultery law and even a
blasphemy law but it is hardly ever applied because society has moved
on. In Pakistan, however, merely accusing a person of blasphemy is
enough to practically pronounce the death sentence on the person because
if the people don’t kill you even before any court finds you guilty,
the judge will be so terrified of acquitting you that he will pronounce
the guilty verdict without applying his mind or evaluating the evidence,
and if by chance he does acquit you, then waiting to kill you outside
the court will be all sorts of people.
There is little doubt that a lot of the terrorism that is affecting
Pakistan now is really a blowback of the Pakistani State’s policy of
using jihadist terror groups as instruments of state policy. But here
again, it was not this policy per se that's the problem. Other countries
have also used such cynical and disastrous policies and lived to regret
it and then being forced to change course and jettison such policies.
But unlike other countries, Pakistan doesn’t have the benefit of the
political and social space for pulling back from the disastrous course
it took some seven decades ago when it first tried to use jihad to
achieve foreign policy and national security objectives. If anything, it
appears extremely unlikely that the Pakistani State (as it is currently
constituted) will survive the wages of this jihadist policy. The reason
is that this policy fits in well and feeds on the national narrative of
extremism. It is both a concomitant and a corollary of the conscious
spread and tolerance of extremist thought in Pakistani society. It is
now part of the culture that the state inculcated in the people.
It is precisely because of this culture of intolerance that
neo-jihadists like Imran Khan and old school communalists like members
of the ruling PML-Nawaz invariably resort to denial, deflection and
obfuscation even in the face of horrific incidents of terrorism. So
terrified are these so-called leaders of the Pakistani people that they
do not even mention the name of the terrorist group which carries out
such attacks, even though the terrorist group openly takes
responsibility for the attack. With almost the entire country suffering
from a sort of national and civilizational Stockholm Syndrome, how can
Pakistan even think of fighting, forget about defeating, the Taliban?
While there are still a lot of right thinking and sensible people in
Pakistan, many of whom display great courage and intrepidness to openly
criticise, condemn and even challenge the Taliban and other Islamist
terror groups and their overground supporters, the sad fact is that
these brave people don't count for anything in today’s Pakistan. The
main reason for this is that they depend on the state to fight on their
side but the state is run by people who are either on the side of the
terrorists or are using terrorists for their grandiose, if also
delusional, strategic objectives or are just too scared of facing, much
less fighting, the terrorists. A prime example is Shahbaz Sharif who
publicly pleaded to the Taliban to spare the Punjab from their attacks
since the PML-N and the Taliban were fighting for the same cause!
Today, the PML-N is in power not only in Punjab but also in
Islamabad, and given the recent resolution passed by the All Parties
Conference for opening a dialogue with the Taliban, the ‘fighting for
the same cause’ has now been taken to the next level, in which the
Taliban have been made ‘stakeholders’ in the system. In such a
situation, the massacre of minorities is a small price to pay,
especially when the PML-N storm-troopers in Punjab have also
participated in pogroms against Christians. Therefore, chances are that
in the coming weeks, months and years, there will be many more such
incidents, all of which will be followed by the usual meaningless
statements of condemnation and bizarre conspiracy theories.
