ON Tuesday, the suburbs of Shergarh, a small town in Mardan district, were rocked by the sound of a blast as a suicide bomber with Uzbek features blew himself up in a crowd of 800 just when the imam had ended reading the sacred text at a funeral. The explosion atomised or rendered limbless or perhaps paralysed for life nearly 30 people, among them Imran Mohmand. Even though he was elected as an independent to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly, he had voted with the Pakistan Tahreek-i-Insaf (PTI) for the present chief minister. Reacting to the Shergarh atrocity, two leaders of the PTI’s Punjab chapter said the suicide attack was a reaction to American drone attacks. Imran Mohmand, incidentally, is the second lawmaker to fall victim to terrorism. On June 3, Farid Khan, a PTI MPA from Hangu, was murdered by terrorists.

Opposition to drone attacks has aroused worldwide criticism, and protests have taken many civilised forms — like the angry voices being raised by rights activists across the globe, including America, or the motorised ‘march’ Imran Khan organised last October and took it to South Waziristan. But when a suicide bomber blows himself up at a funeral it takes self-deception or perhaps lack of a sense of proportion induced by autosuggestion to call this mass murder of fellow Pakistanis a reaction to American drone attacks. This is like the Taliban’s concept of revenge.

After the US Seals killed Osama bin Laden and took his body away, the Taliban swore revenge on America, and indeed they were true to their words, for on May 13, 2011, a Taliban bomber killed 80 Pakistani boys who had graduated a day earlier at the Frontier Constabulary school in Shabqadar, Charsadda district. Some revenge!

On Wednesday it was a pleasure to see Mr Khan taking his oath in parliament and giving us his ideas about the issues of the day — the unjust tax system, inequality in society, Pakistan’s mineral wealth, and, of course, the drones — his obsession. His speech aroused admiration even from a PML-N hawk like Chaudhry Nisar, because the PTI chief spoke “as a Pakistani” without the venom that had characterised his campaign speeches. He was subdued and sober and called for developing a national consensus for finding solutions to all national issues. But the one issue the cricket icon and Pakistan’s most recognised face didn’t touch in his speech was the murder of two lawmakers by terrorists in a province where the PTI is the ruling party.

Exact figures are lacking, but nearly 50,000 Pakistanis have been killed or injured in terrorist attacks. But neither in his Wednesday’s speech nor during his whirlwind, tsunami campaign did Mr Khan even once refer to the half-lakh Pakistani casualties.

Can there be a national consensus on a counter-terrorism strategy when the third largest party in the lower house refuses to acknowledge the truth and temporises and obfuscates? Drones are an issue unto themselves. They are an affront to Pakistan’s sovereignty, and one can talk about them around the clock. But raising the drone issue each time there is an act of terror amounts to diverting attention from the enemy within and justifying fellow Pakistanis’ murder.

This is truly Arthur Koestler’s ‘Darkness at Noon’.