Daily Times

One can always trust an extremist to make the government feel uncomfortable, and uncomfortable is exactly what Federal Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar must be feeling right now. The chief cleric of the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) — a bone of contention in the capital — Abdul Aziz has made it known that he has not offered any written apology to the police after making controversial remarks in the wake of the December 16, 2015 attack on schoolchildren in the Army Public School (APS), Peshawar. This comes after Nisar pacified an angry public by saying that the cleric had tendered a written apology and, therefore, the government would leave him and his mosque alone. According to Chaudhry Nisar, the government has opened up too many fronts in this war against terror and the Lal Masjid front could turn out to be a nasty, messy one indeed. Abdul Aziz is a rabble-rouser who is sitting illegally on a piece of land in the capital, enflaming and inciting hate and extremism. After the APS carnage, he refused to condemn the murders of more than 132 innocent children, indirectly justifying their deaths (because they were children of army officials). This enraged civil society, which started baying for the cleric’s blood. That is when Chaudhry Nisar stepped in last Friday, making excuses for the hateful Aziz. Well, the minister’s claims have been rebuked and the cleric is vehemently denying the existence of any apology in writing. This is just one instance of how the Red Mosque and its chief are becoming a dark stain on the very fabric of our country’s newfound resolve to defeat the militant threat. It has become a symbol of everything that has gone wrong with us, everything we have ignored and allowed to fester and rot.

Abdul Aziz watched over a militant band of Jamia Hafsa female students take out vigilante marches to morally police the citizens of the capital in 2007. Armed with sticks and their fanatical ideology, they tried to coerce peaceful citizens into following a strict draconian version of Islam, venturing so far as to kidnap Chinese parlour workers. After Musharraf’s lop-sided operation against the mosque, the country found itself mired in attack after attack by the newly formed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, with more than 50,000 civilians killed by now. How can a man like Abdul Aziz be allowed to carve out a semi-independent ‘state’ in the very heart of the capital? How can government representatives be so bumbling and ignorant that they are unable to handle men like him? Chaudhry Nisar needs to reassess his role and the rhetoric he uses to placate the country; we need action, not false hopes and a dissembling attitude. *