A new target
September 20th, 2012
Karachi was already on edge before Tuesday’s twin bombings struck a predominantly Dawoodi Bohra neighbourhood in the North Nazimabad area. The city was in the grip of protests against an anti-Islam film and targeted killings continued unabated. Elsewhere, in Balochistan’s Mastung district — the same area where pilgrims were pulled out of a bus and killed last year — a car bomb targeted a bus carrying Shia pilgrims returning from Iran. However, in the Karachi killing, the perpetrators targeted, perhaps for the first time, the Bohras, a peaceful, industrious, mercantile community. The perpetrators knew what they were doing: the site of the blasts is close to the city’s main Bohra mosque, while community members usually gather in the bustling commercial-cum-residential area after evening prayers, which is when the bombings occurred. The blasts came only a day after Mufaddal Bhaisaheb, son and designated successor of the current Bohra leader, was in the metropolis. Last month, a bomb had been discovered and defused in the same spot.
The bombings add a new dimension to the bloodshed, pulling the apolitical Bohra community into the vortex of violence. The authorities still need to confirm whether the attack was purely sectarian in nature, or if it was motivated by the desire to extract protection money from the community. All angles need to be examined. Nevertheless, what the blasts prove beyond any doubt is that nobody is safe in Karachi: if a peaceful community such as the Bohras can be targeted, anyone is vulnerable. Aside from spreading fear, such attacks also undermine the city’s economy. The Bohras constitute one of the city’s oldest and more financially stable business communities. But if people’s lives, properties and businesses are not safe from terrorist violence, who will want to invest in Karachi?
Even as other motivations for the killing are investigated, police have pointed to the possible involvement of a faction of Lashkar-i-Jhangvi believed to be one of the most active militant groups in Karachi, while its acts of terror in Balochistan are already established. Hence, instead of making half-hearted claims about investigating the attacks, the state needs to crush Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, as the outfit is fast becoming the primary source of terrorism in this country. Such action is needed against all terrorist groups as there are reports that members of smaller sects within Islam in Karachi are also being threatened. By not taking decisive steps to curb militancy so far, the security establishment has only facilitated the killers. Until the extremists’ infrastructure is dismantled and their operatives and planners tried and punished, there is little chance of the bloodshed abating.
Overhaul required
September 20th, 2012
The establishment of the National Database and Registration Authority and the computerisation of identity cards rationalised and codified the system. Applicants now found that there was no need to pay the touts that loitered outside government offices issuing documents to ‘help out’. That success, unfortunately, has not been replicated where obtaining a passport is concerned. Even as machine-readable passports become indispensable because they are required for most visas and at a growing number of airports, delays in the system are routine. As reported by Dawn yesterday, some 5,000 passports are issued each day against a daily application rate of 15,000 to 20,000. The backlog has reached a peak of 250,000; applicants are waiting up to two months for a document issued through the ordinary process, and for two weeks or more for passports processed on an urgent basis. The touts are back, and people who do not have the luxury of waiting for the Directorate General of Immigration and Passports (which functions under the Ministry of Interior) find themselves having to resort to the services of an organised network that is in collusion with parts of officialdom.
The current delays are being caused primarily by the non-payment of over Rs640m to the Printing Corporation of Pakistan, which issues the lamination paper used in the document. Other contributing causes include inadequate staff at passport offices and an overloaded online system through which the applicant’s data is verified against the Nadra database. Regardless of the hurdles, the issue must urgently be resolved. A passport is too important a document for people to be kept waiting — especially considering that for a large number of applicants urgent travel is necessitated by medical treatment abroad, employment or immigration. In any case, every citizen has the right to a passport. Whether what is needed is more staff, paper or proper presses to print machine-readable passports, including at Pakistan’s large foreign missions abroad, the state must get on with it. It pulled a rabbit out of the hat with Nadra. It should be able to do the same for travel documents.
Political or spiritual?
September 20th, 2012
A report in our paper on spiritual advice sought by our prime minister on matters presumably political should come as no surprise. Not only is Raja Pervez Ashraf following in the footsteps of his predecessors and political contemporaries, the example of world leaders like Ronald Reagan, whose wife is known to have regularly consulted an astrologer on her husband’s public activities, is also before him. Indian politicians too are deeply influenced by the pronouncements of these gurus, and come election time, the whole country evolves into one huge crystal ball. In Pakistan, leaders from Benazir Bhutto to lesser political mortals like Imran Khan are reported to have consulted pirs and spiritual gurus on their life choices and strategies, the PTI chief talking of it at great length in his most recent book. Black goats, astrologers, numerologists, holy men have all figured in the lives of our leaders. But at the end, we are left with that niggling thought: how would Pakistan have fared without the occult intervening every now and then in our national life?
True, the realities of politics are harsh in Pakistan; the Machiavellian games of rivals, the ever-hovering shadow of an external player, etc don’t make matters easy for the wavering politicians. However, that uncertainty might be quelled if political leaders were to place their faith in the institutions of democracy as firmly as they do in their spiritual gurus. After all, over the years, it is institutions such as parliament and judiciary all over the world that have weathered the storm of wars, rivalries, dissent and external threats to emerge more powerful than any soothsayer. In Pakistan, these institutions are still at a nascent stage, but believing in them would not only strengthen the pillars of state, they would also impart some measure of confidence to an insecure public.