The darkness within
A medieval brutality, a very cancer of the soul, has permeated this society. Not only has it pervaded the hinterland, it has also spread to places where minds are supposed to be enlightened by knowledge and learning.
Each ghastly detail of Mashal Khan’s murder on Thursday illustrates this chilling fact. The 23-year-old student at the Abdul Wali Khan University in Mardan was lynched on campus by a mob of fellow students over allegations of blasphemy.
Video footage of the savagery unleashed upon the young man shows an enraged crowd beating his naked body with sticks, kicking and stoning him while raising religious slogans. Another student was also attacked for the same reason and badly injured; his whereabouts are unknown.
But why should we be surprised at this display of bestiality masquerading as virtue? After all, the road to Mashal Khan’s murder is punctuated with many a landmark pointing to where we are headed: eight people, including a child, burned alive in Gojra in 2009 on allegations of blasphemy; governor Punjab Salmaan Taseer, gunned down by his security guard in 2011 for coming to the defence of a blasphemy accused; lawyer Rashid Rehman, shot dead in May 2014 for defending a blasphemy suspect; brick kiln workers Shama and Shahzad, burned alive by a mob in November 2014 on allegations of blasphemy. And this is but a partial list, even in terms of the lives lost.
For the ruin of many a life has played out in the crucible of blasphemy: people driven out of their homes, deprived of their livelihoods, sometimes even languishing in jail for years because few lawyers now have the courage to defend them.
The culpability of the state — particularly some elements of it — in bringing matters to such a pass is undeniable. For even while spewing platitudes in the name of anti-extremism, it has fed the fires of intolerance and unreason, deliberately creating an environment where mere allegations of blasphemy trigger vigilante ‘justice’ and where appeals to moderation are conflated with defending blasphemy itself.
This is a Damocles’ sword that can conveniently be used to silence anyone professing views that question or contradict the state-approved narrative. And if innocents must die in the process, then so be it.
However, while the law should take its course in punishing those guilty of Mashal Khan’s murder, voices of sanity must speak up in the face of such cynical manipulation of religious sentiment.
Imran Khan, whose party heads the KP government, has rightly condemned Mashal Khan’s lynching, vowing to resist “the law of the jungle”. He is, shamefully enough, so far among the few politicians to have taken such an unequivocal stance.
Even most of the electronic media, otherwise so loquacious, has only covered Mashal Khan’s murder in a superficial manner, carefully avoiding the real issues that underpin the tragedy. Until these are debated, and the contradictions in society acknowledged, our descent into a dystopian nightmare will continue.
‘Mother of all bombs’
Nicknamed the ‘mother of all bombs’, could it also have been the mother of all mistakes?
Having vowed to militarily crush the militant Islamic State group, stocked his administration with retired military leaders and seemingly in thrall to the unrivalled US war machine, President Donald Trump has delivered another military spectacle that is high on theatre and low on strategic planning or intent.
The fight against IS along the Pak-Afghan border is important. The group must not be allowed to find a long-term foothold in the region. By all accounts, military operations by the Afghan forces aided by US firepower and a small military presence on the ground has eroded IS’s strength from a high of several thousand fighters to under 1,000.
The Achin district in Nangarhar province, where the devastating bomb was dropped on Thursday, has seen an intense campaign by Afghan and US forces for several weeks, resulting in the first US casualty of the year in Afghanistan recently.
So why was a bomb with political, diplomatic and international repercussions dropped? It has immediately alarmed some sections of the Afghan state and possibly alienated a fresh swathe of the population; what the US president believes is marvellous, many consider terrifying.
As cheering sections of the media and Trump supporters in the US suggest, the Achin bombing is supposedly meant to signal to the wider world that Mr Trump means business. From North Korea to IS in the Middle East, enemies of the US have supposedly been put on notice.
But what does it mean for Afghanistan? Does it presage an announcement of more US troops to Afghanistan, as the generals have demanded and National Security Adviser Gen H.R. McMaster’s trip to the region is scheduled to determine? If so, where does that leave a stalled reconciliation between the Afghan government and the Taliban?
The American bombing has occurred as representatives from many countries, but not the US, gather in Moscow for a summit on peace and reconciliation. And while the Afghan Taliban were not the target of Thursday’s bombing, the perception that the US is willing to use Afghanistan as a testing ground for its more powerful and destructive conventional weapons cannot bode well for peace in the country.
The longest war in US history has gone from the forgotten war under Bush to the reluctant war under Obama to what under Trump? Strategic clarity in Afghanistan is needed.
Day care in parliament
IN this conflicted world, becoming a ‘first’ in anything can be equally negative or positive. Pakistan has several entries on both sides of the column, yet the subject here, happily, falls into the latter category. It seems that Pakistan’s parliament has become the first in South Asia to open a day care centre on its premises to allow female parliamentarians to continue with their work while having access to facilities where their infants can be looked after. Set up in Parliament House in collaboration with Unicef, the centre has been allotted two rooms on the third floor of the building. It was inaugurated by the speaker of the National Assembly, Ayaz Sadiq, on Thursday, and meets a long-standing, legitimate demand put forth by women members of the National Assembly and the Senate.
There can be no argument that this is a step in the right direction, with the highest house of legislation setting an example that desperately requires emulation at all tiers. It is by no means unprecedented — for years, such facilities have been available at several large corporate entities, though it is debatable whether the motivation stems from concern for the mothers and children, or the hard-nosed business acumen that deplores the loss of workers in whom the company has invested. Either way, the result is laudable. Where day care is available, it has made a substantive difference to the lives of those members — predominantly women but also a few men — of the workforce who otherwise find themselves stymied when trying to juggle small children with work responsibilities. Parliament House needs to follow up by running a strong advocacy campaign that filters down to the lowest levels of employment operations, for that is where such intervention is needed most. It is the working class that has the least options regarding childcare, and also the most to lose by sacrificing a job. Further, providing such options would ultimately see men taking ownership of their children’s needs as well.
Source: Editorials
Published in Dawn, April 15th, 2017