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IF the fuel crisis completely monopolised the news, no matter how uninformed the debate it generated, it affected so many Pakistanis it wasn’t surprising. Neither was the criticism of a government, the myth of whose efficiency based on a previous incarnation now stands in tatters.
However, we are easily distracted. A wedding can push an unspeakable tragedy into the background. At other times someone’s pilgrimage takes over the news and then the funeral of a foreign monarch will attract all our attention.
All this when the focus needs to be solely, I’d say obsessively, on the kind of thinking, the ideology that produces the sort of people who perpetrated that living nightmare on the Army Public School, Peshawar just last month.
There is absolutely no room to ease the foot off the accelerator in the drive against such perversion of a religion, the vast majority of whose followers believe is one of peace, amity and equality. For, when we aren’t cognisant, look what happens. Horrors are visited and our children are targeted and slaughtered.
The Army Public School carnage seemed to have been a rude slap on the face of even the most complacent people around. One could count some politicians and khakis among them too. The hitherto conservative media, a majority of which either feared or empathised with the extremists, changed its tune.
But am I right in asking if we had reacted with such revulsion and unity to similar atrocities being perpetrated in different parts of the country, perhaps we could have been spared the ultimate nightmare that was Peshawar.
Let me name some names and ask if anyone recalls them: Shugufa, Kubra, Masooma, Saliha, Zulekha, Ruqayya, Fatima, Saima, Zainab, Saleema, Tehreem Batool, and Faheema. Let me tell you these girls were attending evening classes when they succumbed in the Hazara Town, Quetta bombing in February 2013.
Be assured I could go on and on and list dozens of names of innocent children targeted by the purveyors of a toxic ideology and practitioners of mass murder, but I won’t. What’s the point of stirring up the pain of their loved ones and, that too, now that we seem to have awakened to the danger?
When we aren’t cognisant, look what happens. Horrors are visited and our children are targeted and slaughtered.
When the prime minister and the army chief say there will be no distinction between the ‘good and bad’ Taliban many of us would like to believe them. For it is this distinction, a suicidal folly, that has brought us to this pass.
Fearful the leadership may walk the talk, many supporters and apologists of the extremists decided to lie low, until of course the Charlie Hebdo controversy gave them a shot in the arm. This presented the religious parties with a legitimate enough cause to galvanise and gather support in the name of faith.
It is another matter that many of these entities to this day have not condemned the atrocities that have claimed 60,000 Pakistanis as casualty. We’d be hard-pressed to find a statement or two of condemnation; and it would be utterly foolhardy to try and find a rally or public protest by them in newspaper files.
What you will definitely find are statements calling murderous criminals such as Hakeemullah Mehsud ‘shaheed’; you’ll find statements where there is visible reluctance to accord a similar status to the brave soldiers laying down their lives for the country; and you’ll find in-absentia prayers for all manner of terror merchants such as Osama bin Laden.
No denying many people were upset, even outraged, by Charlie Hebdo, but if the avowedly religious parties’ response was more aggressive than the rest, one could understand. Post-Peshawar the mood in the country may have significantly eroded their power and influence.
What is inexplicable is the reaction of a spokesman of a party, many of whose supporters object to being called right-wing and see themselves as a progressive force for change. In times when few things can shock you, the Tweet of Fayyaz ul Hassan Chohan, the central deputy information secretary of the PTI left me agape.
I quote: ‘Europe aur Amreeka ke 50 feesad awam ko apne baap kaa patah nahin ke who kaun he; unhein kiya pata ke Tajdare Madina aur Mohsine Insaniyat ki izzat aur hurmat kiya he.’ (Half the people of Europe and America don’t know who their fathers are; how will they know how to respect and revere the Prophet [PBUH].)
This sort of language is clearly in such bad taste, regardless of the hurt and outrage the cartoons may have caused Mr Chohan, that it doesn’t befit a leader of a mainstream political party which claims to be an agent of change.
Even on the strategic plane, it was not given much thought. After all his party leader’s children have a mother, a great and sincere friend of Pakistan and by all counts a woman worthy of respect, who falls in the category of European. Of course, Mr Chohan will say in the happier 50 per cent.
All our politicians should remain focused on the scourge of terrorism that’s ripping our country apart and really don’t need to bother with concerns regarding the parenthood of half the Western society which has found a simple means to determine this where there is an issue. It’s called a DNA test.
Do we have an antidote to the extremist poison that’s sucking life out of us, threatening our younger generation? If the answer is no we should concentrate on that rather than denigrating millions of people we have no idea about.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn January 24th , 2015
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