Even for a nation like Pakistan steeped in cyclic tragedies, the trauma of December 16 this year has been, to say the least, utterly wrenching. It has shattered a people who’d become cynically blasé about blood to their guts and shredded them to tiny pieces that they are finding so hard to collect.
The murderous Taliban’s insatiable bloodlust is nothing new to the Pakistanis. The vandals have been drawing blood regularly from them. But the mayhem at the Army Public School of Peshawar will go down into a class of its own in the dark history of savagery for it was there that the people of Pakistan felt pain like never before. The murderers had gone for their jugular this time, in the real sense of the term.
It doesn’t matter how many innocent children were hacked to death in the orgy of blood that fateful morning. The official tally says 132; unofficial count sets it much higher—as much as 300. At the bottom line, the carnage was horrific enough to lull a nation, momentarily, into a trauma it hadn’t sensed since the ignominious Fall of Dhaka which, by a quirk of history, also happened on the same date, December 16, in 1971—fated to live forever in ignominy in the Pakistani almanac.
India has been routinely lampooned—by historians and intellectuals alike—for its “hand” in the truncation of Pakistan triggered by the birth of Bangladesh. This time around, none except the hard-core conspiracy theorist whose staple diet is India being Pakistan’s implacable enemy and hell-bent on hurting it had anything to suspect an “Indian hand” behind the Peshawar carnage. Quite the contrary, the Pakistan civil society and its influence-peddling elite felt beholden to the spontaneity of genuine outpouring of empathy and humanitarian concern over the dark tragedy that came in droves from across the eastern border.
PM Modi not only spoke his heart out to his counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, on phone within hours of the tragedy but followed it with two- minutes of silence in the Lok Sabha. Schoolchildren across India lit up candles, laid flowers and sang anthems for support for their slain friends from across the Divide. Messages of sympathy came in reams from media lites and showbiz icons alike; the most touching and heart-rending was Anupam Kher’s piece in the Hindustan Times, the day after the tragedy; I found it hard to control my tears reading that obituary written by a great artiste with a heart of gold.
In such an emotionally charged perspective—where a colossal tragedy had bonded the two peoples of India and Pakistan into one tribe of sensitive hearts grieving the loss of innocent lives—it was hard to imagine who was being more insensitive and cold-blooded: the savage Taliban murderers or that anti-terrorism court judge who set free on bail from a prison near Islamabad the notorious mastermind of the November 2008 Mumbai mayhem, Zakiur-Rehman Lakhvi, literally within hours of the Peshawar massacre.
Justice, per se, is believed to be blind. But, a judge presiding over the bail application of India’s Most Wanted Man wasn’t expected to be so purblind in a scenario like the one prevailing two days after Pakistan’s most traumatic episode of mass murder as to shut his eyes completely to the ambience around him and act like an imbecile. The whole nation, nay the subcontinent, was in mourning. Nawaz Sharif had presided over an All Parties’ Conference a day earlier and declared “war” on the terrorists; every political party stood behind this declaration. India, too, was standing four-square behind Pakistan in its hour of horror and sharing its gloom in spades. And yet, there was this pea-brained judge patting the bloodthirsty terrorists on their back and giving them the gift they sought by setting free a master terrorist on bail. Lunatics may come in any garb.
Nawaz was quick at damage control; his government didn’t let Lakhvi out of prison and detained him there under the public disorder law. But the damage had been done, already. India was incensed and up in arms—and rightly so. Was this how it was expected to be paid back for the groundswell of empathy and affection for the suffering Pakistanis’ trauma? The episode underpins the dilemma of Pakistan.
The cold-blooded butchering of innocent kids is symptomatic of terrorism having spread even to those segments of society hitherto presumed to be beyond its nihilistic reach. The Army Public School of Peshawar is located in the heart of its Cantonment area which the layman thought was impossible for the terrorists to breach.
In other words, the scourge of terrorism is now knocking at every door, rural or urban. It’s moving its goalpost, all the time. The military may blast hideouts in the lawless Tribal Lands of Pakistan, as per its claims, but the terrorists are taking their own battle into its homes and hearths. An even more disturbing thing for an average Pakistani is that the monsters are doing it in the name of their own brand of Islam. The murderers, there were six or seven of them, who sneaked into the school were slaying the children but still forcing them to recite the kalima (the verbal affirmation of Islamic faith) while raising the slogan of Allah-o-Akbar (God’s great).
That’s why the grisly mayhem has energised Pakistan’s civil society and intelligentsia like never before. Sensing the demonic reach of the murderers’ assault the intelligentsia finds itself on one page, literally, in its vociferous resolve to take the fight against terrorists to every inch of Pakistan. Islamabad’s civic leaders have besieged the capital’s prominent Lal Masjid to demand removal of its resident preacher—a cleric known for his pro-Taliban sympathies. The fire-belching mullah has enraged mournful Pakistanis by his provocative refusal to condemn the Taliban. Therein is the challenge for Nawaz. The civil society will not allow him to get away with a cosmetic job. It wants all terrorists liquidated. The people’s clarion call is unequivocal: slay the dragon. An earlier-diffident Nawaz has relented by reinstating capital punishment under intense public pressure. The introduction of military courts to try terrorism cases, speedily, is another initiative triggered by demands of swift justice. More is on the anvil.
But, in its own darkest hour of trial, Pakistan’s revitalised civil society—though riveted primarily on its own plethora of challenges—has a word of caution, out of sheer empathy and concern for its Indian opposite number. Alarmed by the news of forced conversion of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism in India on BJP’s watch, it pleads: Draw a lesson from our plight; wherever the state adopts a religion society suffers and bleeds. Don’t make that error.
Karamatullah K Ghori is a former Pakistani diplomat.
Email:k_k_ghori@yahoo.com