While watching (on TV) a mob of Pakistani Christian protesters go on a rampage in Lahore after the suicide terror attacks on two churches last Sunday, a friend quipped that what the Christian community in this country needed were some apologists.

His sarcasm was not belittling the meaningless deaths of those who were killed in the attacks, and nor was he trivialising the fact that two men were burned alive by the angry mob.  

He was simply pointing out how so-called minority religious groups and non-Sunni Muslim sects in Pakistan often take to the streets in large numbers whenever their communities are targeted by the insane segments of society that (for years) had been fattened and tolerated by our state, various governments and some political outfits for rather warped religious, political and ‘strategic’ reasons.

Indeed, things in this respect seem to be changing for the better ever since the elevation of Raheel Sharif as the country’s top military man. He has effectively been able to manoeuvre the PML-N regime and the opposition parties (that seemed paralysed on the issues of extremism and terrorism), to finally take on the nihilistic ogres with a new resolve and a more genuine commitment.

Well, much is still awaited about how this will pan out. But coming back to my friend’s acerbic jibe, he, by suggesting that the Christians needed apologists, was lamenting

that though a majority of those killed by the ogres in the last decade or so were members of Pakistan’s majority Muslim sect (Sunni), one hardly ever saw them react to terrorism the way, say, the Christians do, or for that matter, some Shia groups do.

Another church attack simply triggers off the same redundant reactions from the media and the apologists

According to the friend this was because the majority sect have in its midst a number of apologists who have been extremely active and busy in politics, and (especially) in the media.

These apologists have become masters at weaving narratives that obfuscate the clearly anarchic intentions of the ogres. They then neutralise the immediate angry reaction that emerges after a terror attack, by suggesting that the attacks were being almost entirely orchestrated by shady men in places thousands of miles away.

So, maybe, had the Christian community in Pakistan been blessed with such oracles, it too would have remained quiet; or worse, decided to remain inside their cocoons and instead cursed elusive forces that do not roam the mountains and streets of Pakistan, but sit and engineer diabolic schemes  in dimly lit rooms of Gothic mansions in lands far, far away.

One can never justify mob violence. So condemning what the enraged mob did in Lahore is absolutely the right thing to do. It should be censured as a blatant act of brutality.

But not so when the condemning is done by those who have spent years trying to rationalise, twist, obfuscate and at times even justify (!) terror attacks on schools, in markets, shrines, mosques, and on military and police connections. 

And not so too when the condemning is done by those who remain largely quiet when mobs attack and burn down areas populated by Christians, or beat to death Christian men and women for greedy, materialistic motives that are masked by myopic and distorted religious rationales.

Thankfully, such folk seem a bit more restrained now after the aftermath of the military and government’s resolve to initiate a total operation against the ogres. But they are always on the lookout for openings to express their inherent delusional biases.

Unable to operate in the free-for-all manner of yore (on TV), they now jump to grab the crumbs that fall through the cracks opened by incidents such as the one in Lahore.

For instance, just as the news of a Christian mob blindly killing two men came in, many apologists on social media and on TV channels rapidly moved on from the still fresh news of the attacks on the churches and began to concentrate entirely on the senseless killing of the two men.   

By the next day, the bombings — an ongoing part of the routine of terror in Pakistan — were almost entirely forgotten. It was as if the deaths of over 60,000 Pakistani civilians, soldiers, cops and politicians in the last 10 years or so (at the hands of the ogres), was something secondary to a mob of enraged Christians lynching two Muslim men!

Yes, the lynching was a genuine news item, and unprecedented compared to the lynchings the Christians have faced at the hands of those who believe they were better Muslims than you and I.

But what got my goat was how some TV anchors (on Twitter), were clearly sub-texting an outrage that seem to be exclaiming something like, ‘How dare they (Christians) bite back? How dare they burn, loot and kill in Pakistan?

How, indeed! Only we, the majority faith in the country, have the right to do that, no?   

Nevertheless, as the chronic whiners on both the left and right sides of the ideological divide in Pakistan continue to live in a disorientating vacuum in which they stick condescending labels on anyone trying to take a more rational middle-ground, General Raheel (and thus the PML-N) regime, are quite clearly on their way to slowly but surely initiating a political and even social and ideological clean-up that should have actually been commenced right after the demise of Ziaul Haq in 1988.

The so-called left is sceptical about the operation, which is understandable. But rather amusingly the left’s thinking in this context is still burdened by the baggage that it has been carrying around ever since the Cold War. This is muddying its current narrative. It sounds obsolete and anachronistic, like an abstract, rhetorical relic being waved in a time and place that, for good or for bad, has moved on.

On the other hand, the rightist side is simply sulking. For years it has painstakingly moulded narratives with which it wanted to put the nation on the path of becoming a South Asian Saudi Arabia (without the oil, of course). 

But now these narratives are being challenged by those who once actually helped engineer them: the military establishment. Thus the sulking, and a feeling of quiet betrayal.

Things are actually moving on — in the correct direction. The sceptical left and the sulking right would denounce such an analysis and optimism as being a product of ‘fake liberals.’  

But rest assured, in this case at least, the opposite of fake-liberalism is genuine foolishness. Nothing heroic in being on the wrong side of history. In the end you shall be nothing more than an insignificant footnote. Or worse, just another finger-wagging Tweet.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, March 22nd , 2015

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