As these lines are being written, Raja Pervez Ashraf, the Pakistani PM, has just returned home to Islamabad after a flying, day-long, pilgrimage visit to Ajmer where he paid obeisance at the shrine of Ajmer’s Holy Saint, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti. He was on a private visit there. However, Indian foreign minister Salman Khursheed still feted him at a luncheon in the pink city of Jaipur.
Raja Ashraf — better known in Pakistan as Raja Rental for his scandalous role in the hiring of white elephant rental power plants that drained billions out of the exchequer but produced precious little to resuscitate Pakistan’s paralysed power generating sector — was just walking in the footsteps of his boss, President Asif Zardari, who’d gone on a similar safari to Ajmer last April. Pakistani politicians are heavy on cosmetics and appearances, while being shallow and superficial on substance. This is election time in Pakistan. General polls are expected sometime in early or mid-May. So politicians of all stripes and persuasions are keen to carve out pretty publicity niches that may stand well with the electorate.
Nothing sits so well with the Pakistani electors as symbols laced heavy with religious content. Visits to shrines of saints add weightage and gravitas and carry little baggage with the Pakistani electors exposed, daily, to heavy spoon-feeds of religion. The show of piety gets all the better if the shrine happens to be of the saint revered as the Sultan of saints of South Asia. So Raja and his advisers could rest content that a pilgrimage to Ajmer — even at a juncture when improving relations with India may have hit an unexpected roadblock or detour — couldn’t be anything but a win-win for him to curry favours with his electors back home.
But while Raja was making an impressive show of his religious credentials at the shrine in Ajmer frenzied mobs were torching—at precisely that very hour — more than a hundred houses of poor Christians in Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city and its cultural capital.
Christians in the run-down Lahore locality of Badami Bagh were being punished because of the alleged blasphemy of one of them against the sacred name of Islam’s Holy Prophet Muhammad. It didn’t matter that, as subsequently corroborated by a senior police officer, the young Christian had been wrongly framed. Blasphemy is a tool of torture and terror in a religiously overcharged Pakistan. A mere holler over the loud-speaker of a local mosque by its overzealous maulvi was reason enough to summon thousands of enraged Muslims from all over to the Christian colony and teach them a ‘lesson.’ And lesson was, indeed, taught in spades. By the time frayed nerves of the faithful were soothed by the sight of furious flames lapping up corrugated houses of cowering Christians, more than 125 of them had been charred to cinders.
The practitioners of the most orthodox of Islamic sects draw their inspiration from the example of Saudi Arabia and seem determined to morph Pakistan into an entrenched orthodoxy like no other in the Islamic camp stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. Less than a week before the Christians of Lahore faced the wrath of the ultra-orthodox religious brigade, a Shiite community in the sprawling megapolis of Karachi had a visitation of another kind.
Unsuspecting Shiite residents of Abbas Town, in the heart of Karachi, were subjected to one of the worst crimes of terror, on March 3, when 150 kilograms of explosives, packed in a car, wrecked rows of middle-income flats reducing them to heaps of rubble.
It makes no difference to the purveyors of terror in the name of religion that in the Abbas Town mayhem, at least half of those killed happened to be Sunnis, representing the majority swath of Pakistan’s predominantly Muslim population. Terrorism has taken a very heavy toll of life in Karachi from its polyglot people who flock to what’s Pakistan’s prime industrial and commercial hub in search of opportunity.
The real reason for Karachi, in particular and the rest of Pakistan, in general, being consumed in the fires of terror is that almost each major political party in the country has its militant wing. These militant wings are armed to teeth and their political masters are prone to using them not only for the extension of their political agendas but also to settle scores with opponents.Pakistan’s flirtation with religious extremism isn’t a happening of recent vintage.
It goes back to the Afghan Jihad of the late 1970s and 1980s when Saudi money and American weapons flooded Pakistan and zealots from all over the Muslim world were generously plied with patronage to raise the battle cry of Islamic internationalism to combat the menace of a Communist Russia.
As Pakistan enters the election territory the scourge of terrorism is not only in lock-step with electioneering but seems poised to dictate its agenda of anarchy with a robust intensity. The statecraft is in complete disarray to come up with any credible answer to the enormity of the challenge mounted by terrorists and anarchists. The feckless and endemically corrupt ruling cabal has no road map to stem Pakistan’s alarming drift towards total breakdown and collapse.
Even the Pakistan army—which has traditionally arrogated to itself the right to defend not only the country’s physical frontiers but its ideological frontiers as well — appears to be stymied in the face of the terrorist backlash and paralysis of the country’s political cabal. Its apathy is only whetting the appetite of terrorists and anarchists. In tandem with it, cowering political leaders are suing the terrorists for peace and calling for a dialogue with them.
So elections promise to be no panacea for Pakistan’s festering problems of myriad kind. The situation could get even more complicated with uncertainty given the discredited erstwhile military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, boasting of his plans to return from his exile and stalk the land as a messiah to deliver it from its current crisis. Musharraf is a hated man, in general, but would especially be a red rag to the Pakistani Taliban who fault Musharraf for taking the country into America’s endless ‘war on terror.’ All bets are off as to what unseen catastrophe the election campaign may come up with once the chips are down. Pakistan has a dark history of elections under a People’s Party dispensation riddled with rampant corruption.
Karamatullah K Ghori is a former Pakistani diplomat.
E-mail: k_k_ghori@yahoo.com