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An Islamic Emirate in Pakistan: Sooner than later?

Jagdish Pathak

It is not that an extremist religious outfit, created and used, by the Pakistan establishment brought the entire State of Pakistan on its knees through its more than one mobilization. The Tehreek e- Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), Frankenstein created by the Pak establishment proved too hot for its creators.

Religion and politics blended in the thickets of Pakistan society. Middle, lower-middle, and poor citizenry of this impoverished nation of more than 22 billion mouths has been often fed with the legit or illegit dreams of ‘Jannat’, ‘jihad’, ‘freely available virgins’ rather than the diet of humanity and prosperity. Mullahs were often extremely poor before the entry of 70’s petrol dollars in the entire sub-continent. Their livelihood was dependent on the local mosque collections by the followers. The situation has changed of late. These Mullahs became affluent now because billions of US dollars began flowing in the 80’s period through Pakistan to groom ‘mujahids’ for a jihad against the Soviets.

A large part of these American dollars went into the coffers of these Mullahs to run their newly created jihadi workshops. The dictator of Pakistan became a white knight overnight in the eyes of the West. But, he was clever to know that his Islamic Emirate dream will become reality one day in Pakistan. He sowed the seeds and now the crop is ready for the bloody harvest.

Present day mullah community in Pakistan is not only affluent with several of their children sired through more than one wife and are undergoing western education in Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia and the US. However, the façade of austerity and piety is maintained for poor lot who hope that ‘Allah’ will help them in getting heat in the hearth in current depreciating currency and exorbitant inflationary pressure. The current dispensation of Imran Khan is popularly known as allegedly ‘selected’ government! Selected by the powerful Pakistan establishment which is turning regressive and pretending to be more religious than others. One can often see the PM of Pakistan often carrying rosary in hands in every optical opportunity and unabashedly declaring his love for the prophet!! This is not to fool who knows his background but the blindly religious poor peasantry of Pakistan.

The religious sects of ‘Deobandi’ and ‘Barelvi’ are major groups among the population of Pakistan ‘Sunni’ following with some more but in minority. Afghan Taliban belong to the Deobandi sect and also Jamat Islami and Tahreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Deobandi influence is largely among the Pashtun tribes and some Punjabis. Its influence is mostly limited to the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhawa (KPK) and its borderland in Punjab and Balochistan. However, Barelvi influence is pervasive in the thickly populated province of Punjab and the province of Sind. Almost 60-70% of the Pakistan army, and its paramilitary recruitment is from Punjab province and the majority of recruits coming from Barelvi influence.

With this backdrop, why this recent violence perpetrated by TLP was not responded to by the writ of the state? Writ of the state will take a back seat if the Pakistan establishment will face Barelvi agitation. The reason is obvious, Pakistan security forces will not mind killing and firing on Sindhis or Baloch or even Pashtuns, but would be the last one to take arms up on Barelvi Punjabi agitators.

TLP is the creation of the Pakistan army to keep tabs on any political dispensation and succeeded tremendously on every occasion. Pakistan state is passing through an extreme economic phase because of international pressures on its economy from various important quarters. Pakistan establishment knows full well that armed take over is out of the question now like before due to amendment in the constitution and US legislations for aids. Pakistan army can only maintain control on entire system if these Mullahs can become top temporal leaders like what happened when the Iran revolution culminated with Mullahs occupying topmost position and still kept some kind of democracy. Army is all-pervasive in Iran and it is same in Pakistan. Mullah community will give façade of Islam and keep this community and its followers happy. It appears now slowly clear that Pakistan’s democracy farce will come to end sooner than later. It will be now watched how TTP will fight it out for its own domain in KPK and tribal belt where Barelvi sect is an anathema.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/thirdeyenarrative/an-islamic-emirate-in-pakistan-sooner-than-later/

Women lead fight against extrajudicial killing in Pakistan

Shah Meer Baloch

The wave of abductions amid military crackdown in conservative Balochistan province has mobilized women to protest. 

The surroundings of the missing persons protest camp in Pakistan’s troubled region of Balochistan are sadly familiar to 12-year-old Ansa. For two years after her elder brother Amir was allegedly abducted by security forces, she came to the camp every day and stood alongside dozens of women whose sons, brothers, fathers and uncles had similarly disappeared without trace. They held up their photos and demanded answers and, most of all, the return of their loved ones.

Ansa thought her family were among the lucky ones: Amir was returned alive in 2019 after two years in a detention centre in an unknown location. The family was told by the security agencies never to return to the protest camp again.

But Ansa came back this month after security officials once again broke into their home looking for another of her brothers. Under the cover of darkness Naveed was taken and her family was plunged into a familiar hell, but mercifully this time it was briefer. “I hope I won’t be back to the camp for my brothers but I will keep visiting the missing persons camp for the release of missing persons,” she said. In Balochistan, a highly conservative region where women have restricted rights, it is women, from housewives to students, who have been leading the charge against the continued forced disappearances, human rights violations and extrajudicial killings.

The region, which borders Iran and Afghanistan, is Pakistan’s poorest and least developed. It is home to a long-running and violent separatist insurgency that has been met in response with a brutal military-led crackdown that has targeted political workers, activists, insurgents and family members of those associated with the Baloch National Movement (BNM) and other nationalist groups.

Thousands have been abducted from the streets or their homes in the dead of night, allegedly by plainclothes security agents, and then taken to detention centres in undisclosed locations and often tortured. Some are returned alive, but more often than not the disappeared turn up dead years later.In the past few years the killing of a student, Hayat Baloch, and a picture of his dead body lying in pool of blood in front his crying parents, the murder of Malik Naz, a woman who resisted the private militia in Balochistan, and the mysterious death of a Baloch exile, Karima Baloch, in Canada have mobilised women to protest.Mahnaz Mohammed Hussain, 72, whose three sons allegedly have been killed by security forces, said women were at the forefront of the fight for justice in Balochistan because they continued to pay the heaviest price. “Women suffer the most in conflict and war,” she said. Men get killed or abducted. But now we see our children, young and even women are getting killed, therefore we can’t sit at home and watch.”

On 11 October she resorted to staging a protest in the Balochistan city of Turbat, where she joined a family who had brought out in public the bodies of two young children allegedly killed in a mortar attack by the Pakistan security forces. The Pakistan military has denied involvement in the attack.

To further add insult to Hussain’s grief, when the deputy commissioner came to negotiate with the family, he was dismissive of Hussain, telling her: “We men are negotiating here. Please keep quiet for a while.”

Despite promises by the government to end enforced disappearances – Pakistan’s security forces and agencies have denied claims of abducting civilians, and its media director said in a 2019 tweet: “Our hearts beat with [the] families of every missing person” – it is a problem that is not going away.

According to the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, at least 6,000 people are still missing. Since 2018 an increasing number of female students and women protesting against enforced disappearances have been beaten by the police. Long-promised legislation to make enforced disappearances illegal has still not been passed, and indeed recent amendments to the draft bill would “violate international human rights law and would allow state actors to behave with impunity”, Amnesty International said last week. The UN working group on enforced disappearances also expressed grave concerns at the proposed amendments to the bill, including clauses that harshly penalise relatives for reporting alleged cases of enforced disappearances.

Mahrang Baloch, a renowned activist and a trainee medical doctor whose father was the victim of an extrajudicial killing about a decade ago, began protesting after her brother was abducted four years ago. “It was the moment I decided to protest for everyone,” she said. “And I removed my veil and showed my face to everyone.”

In response, she said, the security forces had begun threatening and abducting the male family members of those leading the protest movement.

“A few months ago they picked up the brother of Dr Sabiha Baloch, the first female chairperson of the Baloch Student Action Committee, a student organisation, just because she has been protesting against enforced disappearances,” said Baloch.

Yet despite the societal pressure and threats from the powerful security agencies, many of the women say they will persist in their fight for justice. Sammi Baloch, 23, not related to Mahrang, along with 10 families walked more than 1,250 miles (2,000km) from Quetta to Karachi and then to Islamabad in 2012 for the release of her father and other missing persons, and continues to be at the forefront of the protests.She also met the prime minister of Pakistan in March and was assured that the issue of enforced disappearances would be resolved and no one would go missing.

“It has been over a decade, I am on the road for the release of my father. I won’t stop protesting unless they bring back my father,” she said. “Rather than bringing back missing persons, the government is bent on punishing us for protesting and asking for our brothers and fathers. The prime minister must fulfil his promise.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/12/women-lead-fight-against-extrajudicial-killing-pakistan-balochistan-protest-abductions

A new national curriculum sparks a backlash in Pakistan

Teachers and parents worry that English-language skills are being replaced by religious content.

Few in pakistan would deny that something needs to be done to improve its education system. The country is well behind Bangladesh, India and Iran, and just barely above Afghanistan, in un education rankings. Less than 60% of people over 15 can read and write, having attended school on average for 5.2 years. In Bangladesh, by contrast, the literacy rate is 74%, with 6.2 years of education.

The headline figures hide as much as they reveal. In the country’s elite schools, the children of the wealthy study in English for international exams and set their sights on the world’s best universities. At the other end of the spectrum, 23m children are not in school at all, with girls much less likely than boys to be enrolled. Government schools, where available, have a reputation for rote learning. Private schools of varying quality fill the gap. Many poor families send their children to madrasas, which tend to skip subjects like science and maths. Some are vehicles for extremist ideologies. Imran Khan, the prime minister, calls this divide “educational apartheid” and has vowed to get rid of it.

Such an aim is admirable, but the tool of choice has come in for criticism from academics, educators and parents. Earlier this year the government began rolling out a single national curriculum (snc) for all schools, including madrasas. This set of minimum standards is meant to improve the quality of teaching and boost the prospects of pupils. But its ambitions are wider still. Among the objectives listed by the education ministry is to increase “social cohesion and national integration”.

The new curriculum has so far been rolled out only in primary schools, but already some of its dictates are causing a backlash. The snc has increased the number of subjects, such as general knowledge, which must use textbooks in Urdu or other local languages rather than English. Mr Khan, himself an old boy of Aitchison College, the country’s most prestigious school, makes his case in punchy post-colonial terms. “When you acquire English-medium education, you adopt the entire culture,” he argues, adding that “you become [a] slave to that particular culture.”

Yet the resistance to the snc’s imposition of local-language learning is not just an elite phenomenon. There have been reports of schools unwilling to implement it. And there is huge demand for English from parents who see it as a way for their children to stand out in the job market, according to teachers. Mariam Chughtai, the director of the national council drawing up the curriculum, says the aim is not to drop English but to elevate local languages. “When we think ‘multilingual’, we think French, German and English. But when you say bilingual in Urdu and English, the elites look down upon it,” she says. Still, “no one is denying the importance of English. It’s here to stay.”

A bigger complaint is that conservatives are using the curriculum to increase religious teaching in schools. Rather than turning madrasas into schools, it will turn schools into madrasas, charge critics. Indeed, the education ministry’s list of “key considerations” in drawing up the curriculum puts the teachings of the Koran at the very top. Non-Muslims need not take classes on Islam, but religious content is seeping into other subjects, such as Urdu-language lessons that include passages on Muslim caliphs. The government argues that there is nothing wrong with teaching religion in a religious country.The third criticism may be the most pertinent. Pakistan’s abysmal learning outcomes are not so much the result of content as of access, says Jasir Shahbaz, an educationalist in Lahore. A new curriculum will do little to fix that. “The issue is not so much what the kids are studying, so much as how many kids are actually studying, or are actually understanding what they are studying,” he says.

The battles are likely to intensify as older pupils start the new curriculum next year. Ms Chughtai says it will take time for results to show. But the furore, she says, is because the changes affect even the elite: “Any time you try to bring a major policy change, for the small minority of people for whom even the broken system was working, they are going to get scared.”■

https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/11/11/a-new-national-curriculum-sparks-a-backlash-in-pakistan