Pakistan: The threat is not over

By and large it was a peaceful Ashura on the 9th and 10th of Muharram. Governments in all the provinces were alert and vigilant. The strategic full deployment of rangers, police, army and other law enforcement agencies has at least shown that if the political will exists, the state has the capacity to keep things in relative order. However, the tendency to become complacent is a caveat that could be easily exploited by the miscreants to strike back. Security cannot be taken as a one-off activity, especially when the enemy is waiting in the wings. Assuming that the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) has lost the capacity to confront the state’s power could prove a self-defeating perception. The TTP remains a threat, whether united or splintered, as some reports suggest in the aftermath of its leadership slipping out of the hands of the Mehsuds. Even disunited, the TTP retains the ability to launch suicide and other deadly attacks. The lull over Ashura could be a tactical move in the face of the massive security alert throughout the country. This should not be assumed to mean that the threat has dissipated. What happened and is continuing in Rawalpindi, bringing the entire city to a halt after a curfew had to be imposed on Thursday night, and which has been extended on Friday, has many lessons that, if learned, could change the complexion of the problems we are confronting on the religious and especially sectarian fronts. It was a cleric’s Friday khutba (sermon) that incensed the procession that was passing by his mosque. This is hardly the first time such provocation has been witnessed. The cleric gave an incendiary sermon against Shia rituals. This infuriated the participants in the procession and violence broke out that saw a cloth market set on fire, resulting in the death of seven people and injuring more than 33 (latest reports say the fire is still smouldering). The police on duty came on the receiving end of the crowd’s fury, which managed to snatch their rifles to make things worse. Eventually the army had to be called in to control the situation. Having become controversial for their role in creating sectarian and religious hatred, mosques and madrassas need the immediate attention of the government through regulations to control the menace emanating from these two institutions. In nearly every Muslim country, sermons are vetted by the government. Pakistan being the exception, has failed to control the vitriol spewed out by clerics uninhibitedly and without check from the pulpit, even while the country is considered the most dangerous as far as Islamic extremism is concerned. In fact the state has been involved in nurturing extremism in the past, therefore the need to manage and control the activities of mosques and madrassas. This anarchy can no longer continue. If the police deployed around Raja Bazar had been sensitized about the importance of the Friday sermon and had acted in time to stop the cleric from his provocation, the gory incident could have been averted. Many madrassas are infested with extremist thinking, which becomes the foundation for mass production of suicide bombers and terrorists. The state has been unable to control them too. When Musharraf tried to regulate them through registration and curriculum changes, he was resisted and then he retreated ignominiously. His ‘example’ has been followed by every successive government. There is no mistaking the fact that terrorism in Pakistan is the result, amongst other reasons, of the extremist mindset of madrassa ‘products’. These extremist ‘factories’ have to be shut down. It is the students of these institutions who venture out to sermonise about their version of Islam. It is about time that the government regulates madrassa education. Those madrassas guilty of feeding the terrorist networks with fresh recruits must be closed down. Those following an archaic syllabus should be forced to revise it and instructed to include modern and wider education than just religious instruction so that the end product is not always a cleric but someone with the option of pursuing a different career. The misuse of religion has spiralled out of control over the past few decades, so much so that even the state has been taken hostage by it. Terrorism has to be uprooted along with the sources that breed it. For this, the state has to control the ways in which religion is being misused by the mullahs.