Militant clerics are still treated as some kind of anti-elite heroes: Nadeem F. PARACHA. — File Photo

Ever notice how certain TV anchors and ‘political experts’ on various channels have subtly rearranged their dyed-in-the-wool narratives after an overall consensus against the Taliban started to build up? But many TV men are still at it; doing all they can to continue finding a few nodding heads for their rhetorical nay-sayings, and their rather pathetic spiels that smack of armchair reactionary-ism.

So what’s the post-consensus change in their stand then?

Last week on a political talk-show on a news channel, an anchor invited Dawn columnist, Kamran Shafi, and eminent scholar, Professor Mehdi Hassan. Like many of his contemporaries on other channels, this anchor, too, now found himself frustratingly bounded by the sudden consensual support the government and the army have managed to gather from majority of Pakistanis.

This seems to be an irritant for many self-righteous anchors. Because now if they do challenge army action in Swat and Waziristan, they might end up sounding unpatriotic. So here is how they’ve planed to counter their dilemma. Since most of them still seem to be frozen in the combative and reactionary mindset that they developed during the troubled Musharraf years, they have started taking the fight to the government in other areas of concern, one of which is the Lal Masjid debacle.

Coming back to the said TV show with Shafi and Prof. Hassan, the anchor kept questioning the two men on the issue of the army action in Lal Masjid, an episode that is now over two years old. Such anchors are only echoing a strategy discovered by political parties and politicians (such as the JI and the PTI), whose reactive narratives have been damaged most with the growing consensus against the Taliban.

Not happy with both Kamran Shafi and Prof. Mehdi Hassan’s advice to the media to continue supporting democratic forces (both in the government and opposition), so that demons like religious extremism can be kept at bay, the anchor suddenly quizzed them on how ‘the state murdered young children and women’ in Lal Masjid.
Even though most guests on talk shows when confronted with such questions usually start sounding apologetic — simply because such questions are posed as substantive truths whose challenging would be a blasphemous mistake — both Shafi and Prof. Hassan were in no mood to do that.

First of all, as the highly-charged fog of the Musharraf era clears, reports have started to appear that the number of women and children killed in the Lal Masjid operation might have been grossly exaggerated by the media.

Secondly, some frontline journalists — now even in the largely reactionary Urdu print and electronic media — have also started suggesting that whatever the number of children and women present in the mosque, they were actually used as human shields by militants. Almost everything about the Lal Masjid episode remains speculative and highly polemical.

But one thing was always clear, and this is also the point that Prof Hassan raised: How can anyone sympathise with what they saw on TV screens before the operation began?

Men with brand new Kalashnikovs, grenades and gas masks patrolling the roofs of Lal Masjid; burqa-clad women with dandas roaming the campus of the Jamia Hafsa; and young teenagers armed with bricks and stones. ‘Is that what a mosque is about?’ asked the professor.

Unmoved by the professor’s retort, the frustrated anchor then moved towards Kamran Shafi, claiming that the Lal Masjid episode was ‘staged by the state to gain the sympathy of the West.’

Of course, had the gentleman’s show been blessed by the likes of Imran Khan, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, PML(N)’s Saad Rafiq or any of the many loud cranks calling themselves ‘analysts’ out there, he would have got affirmative and equally rhetorical sound bytes, but Shafi had other ideas.

Answering the anchor’s assumption about the establishment’s hanky-panky during the Lal Masjid operation, Shafi stated, that (if such is the case), then why would the same establishment not allow the wife and daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to attend the hanged leader’s funeral, but fly the body of the extremist Lal Masjid cleric, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, to his hometown in a chartered military helicopter and allow thousands of people to attend his funeral?

Of course, Shafi was commenting on the stark difference in how the establishment has treated its democratic opponents compared to its assorted extremist nemesis, but anyone using this observation in the context of Lal Masjid should once and for all dispel the myth and romance that certain politicians and TV anchors continue to attach to the Lal Masjid personnel.

They are still treated as some kind of anti-elite heroes, when in essence, just like the Taliban, these militant clerics too were once cogs of the reactionary Pakistani state; cogs who failed to keep up with the changing nature of the game that the same friendly state now found itself playing after 9/11.

In other words, either we can call them Frankenstein monsters, or simply, spoiled Islamist brats who rebelled after dad started to change his ideological focus.

Absolutely nothing heroic about any of it.