EVEN as sectarian tensions simmer — as the latest killings in Karachi demonstrated yesterday — efforts are apace elsewhere to find ways of ratcheting down the tensions between the various Muslim sects in the country and to prevent radical elements from whipping up passions. On Monday, religious leaders gathered in Lahore to endorse a nine-point code of conduct drawn from a previous list already mooted by Maulana Tahir Ashrafi in the Council of Islamic Ideology. The essence of the code of conduct agreed to in Lahore on Monday points in the right direction: curbing sectarian hate speech, banning hate literature and graffiti, resisting the use of mosque loudspeakers for anything other than the call to prayer and sermons in Arabic, etc. However, the same questions that were asked by this newspaper and others when Maulana Ashrafi presented his 15 points before the CII are relevant to assess the latest effort.

Most basically, who will ensure that the code of conduct is adhered to across the board and in an impartial manner? No one ever condones hate speech publicly, but the problem is more specifically elsewhere: few religious leaders condemn it when it emanates from their side of the sectarian divide and is targeted at other groups. Therein lies one of the great tragedies of Pakistan’s by now long-running sectarian problems: the community leaders who ought to be shunning hate either passively tolerate it or actively propagate it. Maulana Ashrafi has talked of the eventual goal being parliamentary legislation and a robust enforcement mechanism. But that only brings the issue to the next problem: does the state have the will or the capacity to enforce its writ in the cauldron of sectarian tensions? So while something has to be done, it’s not yet quite clear what exactly will work.