Fatal reverie

Published March 1, 2014

IN a day and age when men of God making regular TV appearances almost always arrive at the studios in their personal vehicles, often expensive 4x4s, accompanied by dozens of flunkies, many among them armed, the murder of Allama Taqi Hadi Naqvi was shocking for many reasons.

I didn’t know the scholar personally neither did I ever meet him. But I must say I was impressed with how politely yet firmly he rejected bigotry, violence and the concept of enforced religion via coercive means whenever I saw him talking on TV programmes.

He stood for peace, amity and communal and sectarian harmony. Taqi Hadi Naqvi had a pleasant demeanour but the educationist in him didn’t allow him to talk lightly about the responsibility of each towards educating their children and aiding in their enlightenment. He termed it a religious obligation.

Despite being mild-mannered, this man could hold his own against the best. The little I saw of him on TV made me believe he was a true gentleman who embodied the humanity that all religions must aim to have at their unadulterated, correctly interpreted core. The man’s scholarly excellence was apparent to all who paid attention to his words.

That he was killed in Karachi on Thursday by gunmen was surprising enough. Yes, for who in their right mind would kill such a lovely man with a message of peace, love and unity? If his killing was shocking, it was staggering he was actually travelling in a rickshaw from his place of work in Nazimabad to his home in Buffer Zone when the assassins struck.

Someone who knew him well told me he was an excellent scholar whose wisdom was second to none but he was a ‘ghareeb aadmi’, a man of very modest means who was content with what he had and never sought more. But was this man poor or is our society today so much the poorer for such a loss?

I recall the killing of another educationist, Prof Sibte Jafar, the principal of a college in Liaquatabad, last year when he was heading home after work on a motorcycle. It is indeed a sad reflection on society when educationists live such frugal lives and serve us with dedication and we can’t even afford them protection of life and limb.

Reading newspaper accounts of Thursday’s killings in Karachi reinforced the fear that if the state fails to protect its citizens and a disproportionate number of one targeted group are killed in broad daylight then sooner or later a chain reaction of killings and retaliatory killings will follow. And it appears this may have started.

My good friend Shahid Hayat, the resolute yet under-immense-pressure police chief in the metropolis, needs to focus his resources to stop this now or the situation may spiral totally out of control. That is if it hasn’t already.

And to those fighting terrorism and developing and executing a counterterrorism policy across the country I have one piece of advice. There isn’t anything ‘good’ about anyone who takes an innocent life in any name, for any cause. Worse still if this killing is in the name of religion or God.

We have come to this pass with our several decades of ambivalence towards the Taliban and other jihadis. They must chuckle at their joint strategy meetings when our policymakers term them good and bad. They know they are one, all inspired by the Al Qaeda ideology. We are the ones who are delusional.

Our architects of strategic depth and authors of global jihad differentiate between killers on the basis of who they target. How many examples of when these guns have been turned 180 degrees and trained on us, would we need to accept the truth.

Lots of column space has been taken up by the militant leader from KP, (Major) Mast Gul. Formerly belonging to the Jamaat-i-Islami-backed Hizbul Mujahideen, he shot into the headlines in 1995 when, along with many other gunmen, he got holed up in the shrine of Charar Sharif in India-held Kashmir.

That several weeks long siege ended when the shrine caught fire after (it was then believed) Indian troops stormed it. Mast Gul was able to escape in the ensuing confusion. The shrine was totally gutted. He was accorded a hero’s welcome on return to Pakistani Kashmir. However, of late doubts have emerged about who was responsible for starting the fire.

While the Indian army is quite capable of having stormed the shrine and setting it alight in pursuit of its military objective of clearing the site (as the damage to the Sikh Golden Temple in Operation Blue Star would suggest), there is now reason to also believe that Mast Gul may have ordered this. Shrines and other such holy places are meaningless in his ideology.

Ace security reporter Amir Mir has written in The News that after recent attacks by Mast Gul (who is now part of the TTP), the militant is now one of the most wanted men in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Before long other past assets such as Jaish-i-Mohammad’s Masood Azhar would go the same way, despite what our security agencies geniuses may believe now.

If the killing of real assets such as Taqi Hadi Naqvi won’t shake us out of our reverie, nothing else will. I would not even hazard a guess about our direction in that case.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

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