Opinion Murder In Karachi

[related-post]

Watch Video: What’s making news

A “splinter faction” of the Pakistani Taliban has said it had killed Sabri because he was a “blasphemer”. These elements, hurt after the army hit them hard in North Waziristan with Operation Zarb-e-Azb, have registered their rage. The latest killing gives us a measure of how far Pakistan has allowed Karachi to drift into the control of terrorists.

In addition to al Qaeda and the Islamic State, all Islamist-terrorist organisations have to finance themselves through bank holdups and kidnappings. If you are rich and want to be safe you give to the madrassas for protection, and it works without incriminating the madrassas. With the passage of time, Karachi is not the only place where madrassas have proliferated. During the past decade, the “Barelvi” interior Sindh too has spawned its own Deobandi seminaries relocated from South Punjab. If you kidnap in Karachi, take the victim out of the city into a countryside no longer tolerant of Hindus and Muslims, once dancing together at saintly tombs.

It all started after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Iran and Saudi Arabia got into a clinch in the Gulf region and then shifted their war to Pakistan. Deobandi and Wahhabi madrassas in Karachi began to be funded directly by the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia. Then the foreign fighters were absorbed to help Pakistan defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan without using its own troops. Machiavelli from his grave rebuked that not using your own troops in wars will enslave the state to these borrowed warriors; but Pakistan needed the money and was bothered only about India in the east and dreamed of “strategic depth” against it in Afghanistan.

Karachi, and later Peshawar and Quetta, attracted the warriors, but Karachi bestowed anonymity and power with money plucked from its rich. The underworld woke to the new landscape with firearms and became active, its killers arrayed in flowing beards. Black wealth piled up soon enough and political parties shaded off into terrorism, making Pakistan ungovernable.

Terror in Pakistan is bearded and steeped in prayer. Dishonest bureaucrats, politicians, businessmen and shopkeepers look like clerics and pack a lot of power through their backers in the no-go areas. Commanders of the Pakistan Army too are faced with officers “defecting” to al Qaeda, yearning for an Islamic revolution that will destroy India and teach America a lesson.

The courts are scared. Pakistan can no longer pay itself out of trouble. In the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, Imran Khan’s government has shocked the country by gifting Rs 300 million to the country’s most notorious seminary, Madrassa Haqqania, on record as having apostatised the Shia. Haqqania is the well known breeding ground of the Taliban; its leader Samiul Haq can intercede with the terrorists if they put too much heat on Peshawar through their agents pretending to be normal citizens. Peshawar wants Haqqani to call off his dogs. The state failed earlier when it did nothing after learning that the Taliban-backed killers of Benazir Bhutto in 2007 had stayed in this madrassa.

General Raheel Sharif aroused hope when he took on the Taliban and the gangs of Karachi. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif tried to change his image from Islamic to “liberal”, telling the Hindu community he would like to celebrate Holi with them; and he also got Punjab to legislate against increasing “Islamic” violence against women. The clerical power reacted and gathered in Lahore in their strength, threatening to dethrone him if he did not shun liberalism.

Sharif first had heart trouble and then ordered 12 years of uninterrupted teaching of the Quran in all educational institutions in the country. Clerically-dominated Council of Islamic Ideology condemned the law against violence to women, after which half a dozen girls/wives were cruelly murdered by normal citizens, as if sending a message to Islamabad. The mullah had won.