October 28, 2016: When police was on high alert and cracking down on the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) activists, at a time when section 144 was imposed in Islamabad, a banned organisation, Ahl-e-Sunnat-Wal-Jammat (ASWJ) conducted its congregation in the capital, that too in broad daylight and with glaring fearlessness. The crowd present at the congregation shamelessly chanted slogans of declaring Shia Muslims “Shia kafir” (infidel), and nothing was done to stop them.
October 29, 2016: The very next day, militants opened fire on a religious gathering of Shia Muslims in Karachi’s North Nazimabad area. The attack killed four members of the same family, and left many others injured.
While there is no concrete link between the two events, but it is congregations such as the one in Islamabad that produce hate speech, perpetuate bigotry, and incite violence towards the country’s minority communities.
Government’s heavy-handed treatment of PTI workers on one hand, and its blindness towards the activities of banned religious organisations on the other points to both the strength of the religious right in Pakistan, and government’s lack of resolve to rein them in. Capitulation to the religious right has been characteristic of Pakistani state for a long time, and this has emboldened them to carry out activities with impunity. When the country is in a state of war against terrorism, and for that purpose extraordinary laws are put in place that deny citizens due process, and gives state machinery wide-ranging powers of detention, but no action is taken against brazen threats coming from Lal Masjid, a religious establishment right in the heart of the capital, then that raises serious question marks over the state’s role in fighting religious extremism. Similarly, when Difa-e-Pakistan Council (DPC), an amalgamation of banned outfits, can openly announce that it would hold rallies in Pakistan for the Kashmir issue, then that is a testament to the space that these banned organisations still occupy in the country. Why the National Action Plan is not being implemented and leaders of these organisations not being arrested is a mystery. Certain toxic organisations of the religious right hold a great deal of power in Pakistan because they use Islamic slogans to perpetrate their violence. Through misconstruing Islamic principles and justifying their heinous crimes against humanity on distortions of religious injunctions, they create support for their activities from mostly among the poor and illiterate segments of Pakistani society. Some organisations even fill the vacuum created by the state’s inability to provide basic services, and do welfare work as a cover for their nefarious activities.
Moreover, the patronage that some of these organisations have received for both strategic objectives, and the regional battle of conservative Wahabi Islam of Saudi Arabia against the revolutionary character of Shia Islam in Iran has resulted in them having a well developed structure. Through it, militant religious organisations are able to keep on producing militants to perpetrate their terror.
The activities of these groups have made life of minorities in Pakistan unsafe and insecure. Having taken upon themselves to declare anyone who deviates from orthodoxy as infidel, these groups need to be eliminated and their space wrested from them. Timidity and capitulation towards them is not just shirking from responsibility but downright criminal. The military has increased its institutional turf quite substantially due to the ongoing war against religious terrorism, and while it has effectively broken the base of operation of the Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, examples of the ASWJ and DPC openly carrying out processions and rallies show that quite a great deal of work is still to be done. Merely concentrating on foreign-backed militants will simply not do, and action has to be taken against home-grown militancy. Of course, the civilian administration has a much bigger part to play as it is the one that has to carry out operations against them.http://dailytimes.com.pk/editorial/31-Oct-16/and-the-massacre-of-shias-continues
Comments are closed.