ON Aug 16, Punjab home minister Shuja Khanzada was killed when, according to preliminary reports, two suicide bombers attacked his political office in the village of Shadi Khan in Attock district. At least 18 other people were also killed as the magnitude of the blast caused the building to collapse, trapping all, supplicants and saviour, under its rubble. In the hours that followed, the body of retired Colonel Khanzada and several others were retrieved; funeral prayers for him were offered the same night. In his statement, Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif announced three days of mourning for the slain minister.

Three days of mourning, perpetual and recurrent, have become a mainstay of political life in Pakistan. Beyond the religious prescription that underlies them, they have become the only offering a terror-worn nation has left to offer those that die in its path. So it has been in the case of tragedies past, after the massacre of schoolchildren and after the bombings of mosques. So it is with the death of yet another brave man, who had taken on the onus of fighting the most vile, who was a target because he had taken a strong position against the cancerous tumours of extremism that have made their home in the vital organs of the country. In February of this year, Mr Khanzada told reporters that half of the 12,000 madressahs in Punjab were unregistered and that he had mobilised 170 teams to document them. He had also initiated a drive against hate speech; mosque loudspeakers must only be used to deliver the sermon and the call to prayer, not to rally mobs to hatred and destruction. While he lived, the former military man who had been one of the first Pakistani soldiers to reach Siachen Glacier, was determined to bring militant groups under the regulatory powers of the state. It is likely that for this resolve he was killed.

This of course is just the public portion of the loss, the one that aligns with the neat official prescription of three days of mourning — one for shock, another for speculation and a final one for forgetting. There is also the private dimension, the suffering of those for whom three days will not wrap up the loss and pain wreaked by Sunday’s tragedy. These are those family members, the uncles and nephews, wives and daughters, whose worlds collapsed with the building and the blast. These are those who called cell phones that rang through the rubble, and who hoped against hope as they watched the aftermath on television.

It is easy to forget the private and the personal dimensions of a war that is everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time.

Several male members of the family had been with Mr Khanzada at the hujra when the attack happened; they had gathered there to offer fateha for another relative who had passed away in London. Those who survived the blast were left with the task of identifying remains at the morgue, organising burials and saying goodbye — a maimed family, forever shattered by the war that rages across the land. In a terror-struck country, it is easy to forget the private and the personal dimensions of a war that is everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time.

Like many Pakistani children, I was raised on stories of war, the struggle for independence and those that came afterwards, the blackouts of the ‘60s and ‘70s retold by adults who had lived through them. Those were the wars of sirens and of hiding under stairwells, of headlights painted black and neighbours banding together. The embrace of darkness was voluntary then; flickers of light could give away locations to enemy planes flying overhead. Those were the sort of wars that Colonel Khanzada trained under, wars of invasions and territory and incursions by foreign fighter planes. Against the disarray of today, those bygone wars appear to be the easier wars, where enemies were clear and objectives obvious.

The war he died fighting is of a different sort, composed of seemingly endless installments of three days of mourning, the end of one marking the tragic beginning of another. A preliminary investigative report by the Punjab police said the attack was in retaliation for the killing of Lashkar-i-Jhangvi chief Malik Ishaq and 13 others during an ‘encounter’ in Muzaffargarh last month. Like others proffered on the second and third days of official mourning, this theory raises more questions. If the possibility of such an attack was so well known, why could it not have been prevented? How did an assassin, and possibly two, wearing suicide belts enter a village where everyone claims to know everyone else? How was it that the broad daylight, the well-frequented hour, the presence of so many, did not draw attention to the lurking strangers? Then there is the issue of the checkpoints, several on the road that led to the village, all of which it seems were unable to accomplish the task for which they exist. If the second and third days of mourning bring theories and conspiracies, they also bring questions with few answers, not paths to factual conclusions but loops to more speculation. Perhaps the assassin was not a stranger; it’s possible that someone at the checkpoint was paid off; like an amoeba, doubt colonises our minds and obscures our paltry allotment of facts.

The three days of mourning allotted to home minister Shuja Khanzada are nearly over — the rote public ritual of mourning, the shock, the speculation and the forgetting all complete. The war, however, continues: bombings in the north and retaliations everywhere else, coffins and funerals scattered all over the country, the amoebic murkiness of terror, enclosing and encompassing all. Amid all of it we hold on to the fiction of three days of mourning, counting down losses one after another and sometimes together.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 19th, 2015

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