Daily Times

Along with their tanks, screaming jet fighters, Hind helicopters and Vodka, the Soviet invasion brought in a deadly virus into Afghanistan, which infected millions of already underdeveloped minds in that country as well as Pakistan. It befuddles the rationalising faculty of the brain and disrupts clear vision. Thus it creates a walking zombie in the streets, a sub-species that we have in abundance in various shades and grades. The breeder nurseries dot the countryside, with mother wasps collecting particularly searing fluids to arm their wards with the deadliest of stings. As a result we have become immune or perhaps emotionally inert as we show nearly mechanical reactions to killings and destruction mainly caused by sectarian hitmen and other communal killers in our neighbourhoods. A dreadful hardening of individual and social attitudes to human suffering has taken place. Spaces for hospitality and sympathy for the needy, strangers and resourceless travellers have woefully shrunk. With a strange twist of nature an awful transformation for the worst is taking place. Everybody is scared and suspicious of the other’s capacity for mischief. There is hardly any trust in others’ goodness. We had doors wide open in our deep souls since centuries, which are being forced shut and windows are being barred. It is so dark, damp and suffocating down here.

Roads and streets in living localities are rudely intercepted by concrete roadblocks and strewn by armed guard posts with menacing weapon muzzles thrust out towards you, in case one gets curious. Children are hardly ever seen prancing about in the little green patches on the street corners for fear of being kidnapped or run over by scared, speeding drivers. Foreboding and the smell of cordite seem to perpetually hang in the air everywhere, just as it feels during a lull in a firefight. A beggar’s call on the door is returned by a ferocious dog bark more often than not. Similar to our countryside, where the sprawling farmhouses are devouring unspoiled spaces and housing societies are mushrooming, the bald scavengers of our belief are mercilessly brutalising innocent, trusting and friendly patches in our hearts and minds. The beautifully balanced, tolerant and hospitable society that our ancestors so painstakingly built is being dismantled brick by brick by an alien but viciously destructive horde marauding around as purer Muslims and guiding angels for the blissfully ignorant common man. Those who do not submit are invariably condemned to die, be dispossessed, socially discriminated against or forced into exile. They allow no room for co-existence, as in their handbook there is no place for honest dissent or earnest dialogue. Their worldview is jet black with not a speck of white anywhere. What motivates them to commit appalling atrocities under their horsetails banner in our country? Traditionally we had a place for all ideologies, religions and races and always had plenty to spare.

The other day while travelling from Lahore to Bahawalpur I saw an endless chain of goods carriers and container lugging power trucks loaded to capacity with agricultural produce and industrial products moving both ways on the road, all the six hundred kilometers between the two cities. These were besides those beyond both the cities, in the parking lots, workshops and being loaded at the godowns and factories. Green wheat fields, vast vegetable patches, healthy sugarcane plantations and even the left over cotton crop was spread far into the distant horizon on both sides of the highway, interrupted only by flowing irrigation canals, immense fruit orchards, sleepy hamlets and awkwardly placed storage sheds. The journey was like travelling into a picture frame. This is the great plenty that we are blessed with. We feed not only our own people but also the whole of imperious Afghanistan and far into Central Asia.

With so much to spare, how is it that these people from the paranoid fringe can spread their sinister dogma into a richly endowed society like ours? Clearly, the voracious greed of our power elite, terrible misgovernance and a gigantic failure of the justice system in the country have created an environment conducive to anarchy. Warlordism, sectarian vigilantism and Robin Hoods of the Mangal Bagh/Mullah Fazlullah variety are the natural outcome. These men mostly belong to vicious cults like Wahabis, Salafists, Takfiris and the sort, all of which originated either in Saudi Arabia or from their mentor priests on the plateau of Egypt. Their distant mistress and equally inflexible proxy, the infamous Deobandis sprang up in undivided India when Deoband scholars caught the deadly virus while in Saudi Arabia. Slowly it became the cradle of the madrassa (seminary) network, which became notorious as training grounds for the extremists in our neck of the woods and an alma mater for future Taliban. This courtship of hate got a militant twist when Syed Ahmad from India went for Hajj and returned via Kandahar and Kabul in 1823 to set up his military camp on the western border of the Frontier, which was at the time under Sikh rule. He was not the first one and by no means the last. Sir Naville Chamberlain (1863) aptly described them as the ‘Hindustani fanatics’. These were the finished sharps and spikes from Deoband who went around the entire Pushtun belt inciting visionless rebellion, causing death and destruction in the wake of each of their abortive adventures. However Pashtuns were also equally eager collaborators drawn in by the lure of whatever loot and booty they could spirit away as a result of temporary rupture of the ruling writ.

One may note that these were the same enthused men who forcibly monopolised the defence of Delhi and then prevented a rapprochement between the besieging British forces and beleaguered Moghuls in 1857. Most regrettably, they diverted a purely patriotic and political struggle against British overlordship, first into jihad and then into Sunni jihad, thereby effectively alienating the majority non-Muslims of India from the momentous struggle, followed by needlessly pushing Shias away from the mortal contest. Their typical shortsightedness inflicted irreparable damage upon the patriotic cause and finally brought about its ignominious defeat. Thus through their chronic lack of political sagacity, they precipitated the collapse of Moghul rule and Muslim primacy in the Subcontinent. Not that Moghul rule had any great sway then but it had a tremendous symbolic value and was a rallying point for the Indians to strive for sovereignty and national integrity. The fall of Delhi unhinged the master joint that had held Indians of all religions and hues together since centuries and firmly hammered the peg into the chink between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Subcontinent. Sadly the mistrust and acrimony they perpetuated persists unaddressed to this day.

(To be continued)

The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan army and can be reached at clay.potter@hotmail.com