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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (46075)	5/9/2004 7:10:16 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Respond to of 50167

EDITORIAL: The beast within our body politic Fifteen people have died and over hundred injured, some critically, in the bomb blast at a mosque in Karachi. This is a tragedy, just like other such acts, and condemnation has come thick and fast in its wake. But we are still glossing over the real questions. Two broad strands are discernible: most people think the government has not done enough and is not doing enough to contain the threat of violence; two, and this includes victims interviewed after the outrage, that such acts are being perpetrated to divert attention from what is happening elsewhere in the world, especially in Iraq. The not-so-hidden assumption in this thinking is that Muslims cannot commit such an act in a mosque and this is the handiwork of those powers (the US-India combine?) that are opposed to Muslims and Islam in general and Pakistan in particular. Let’s look at both. The training, functioning and motivation of our law enforcement agencies (LEAs) are not up to the mark. That’s an accepted fact. Nonetheless, in the past two years, the overall record of LEAs has been fairly good. Statistics of arrests of various groups, including Al Qaeda operatives, bears testimony to this. There is always room for improvement, but to say that such acts can be eradicated or pre-empted with 100 percent results is not correct. Israel, arguably, has the best expertise in the world to tackle this kind of violence. It has the advantage of walling in its adversary and ensuring that anyone entering Israel from the Palestinian territories can be checked and identified. Even so, it has not entirely been able to eradicate the threat posed by the Palestinian suicide bombers. Clearly, we cannot wall in or out anyone. The LEAs have been trying to penetrate the various extremist groups that have mushroomed over the years in this country. In fact, if bombs are not going off regularly in Karachi and elsewhere, it must have something to do with the degree of difficulty the groups face in conducting such operations. But in addition to improving the capacity of LEAs to pre-empt such attacks, we need also to look at other reasons. This is where we find a linkage with the second strand. Are Muslims incapable of perpetrating this kind of violence and that, too, in a mosque? The answer is yes. Not only have we seen this phenomenon in the past decade-and-half, it goes back to the very early days of Islam. Three of the four rightly-guided caliphs were assassinated, two of them in the mosque. In recent cases, a number of sectarian and other extremists have been captured and have confessed to their heinous crimes. The two massacres in Quetta, in June last year and during Moharram this year, have been squarely traced back to sectarian-jihadi groups. Once we accept the reality that we have the beast within, we would need to look into its genesis and protean reproduction. This beast is the product of the Afghan war, the literalist Islamisation of this society, the deliberate empowerment by the state of the rightwing elements, the distortion of human values through theological ideologisation and so on. The state used every arrow in its quiver to shoot down humanism and pluralism and replace it with religious literalism. It did this by distorting the textbooks (our current education minister says she is a fundamentalist!), using the state-owned media to thrust the ideological bilge down every throat and letting its official and unofficial hounds loose on all those who tried to put up a fight against this brutalisation of society. Lest we forget, it even co-opted large sections of the so-called independent press to advance this agenda. Now the monster threatens to devour the state itself. The irony is that while the state wants to reform itself, the people won’t let it be reformed. This is the real challenge; the atrocities in the form of bomb blasts are merely the symptoms of the malaise. The need of the hour is to reverse the mindset. That is more difficult than just tracking down the perpetrators of this latest outrage and punishing them for it. * dailytimes.com.pk