Daily Times

A blast ripped through the Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park, Lahore, on Easter Sunday, killing 72 people and injuring more than 300, most of them poor, vulnerable and helpless, people who went with their families to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether or not Jesus was resurrected on the third day after Crucifixion is a religious debate that will never be settled. What can be settled meanwhile though is that the people who lost their lives in Lahore are not going to be resurrected, not in this world, regardless of their faith, age or gender.

It has saddened everyone — me, you and everyone around you — so much so that I think we would not mourn any differently if anyone in our family had lost his/her life. I see people around me in tears, their souls heavy, their arms folded, as if time for talks and discussion is long gone for them. It is time to show some muscle. Their response makes me happy. Somehow, looking at their resolve, I feel positive about the future of Pakistan. I feel that eventually we would come out of it — weak, wounded and disfigured for sure but not without a victory clutched in our hands. I have no doubt that it is waiting for us so long as we are ready to put our acts together and seize it, however, it is not a low-hanging fruit. It has to be earned through hard work.

Do not get me wrong, I am as angry as you are on the loss of each and every soul, maybe even a little more. However, after a long painful decade — as if my prayers have finally come true — I notice that the Sunni majority of Pakistan also carries a heart in its chest that can beat for the Christian minority of the country, that it considers non-Muslims as human beings too who need to be protected and be permitted to celebrate their religious festival. And even though many of them would not like to share the same crockery with the people of the book — a deplorable tradition — they are still capable of considering the followers of Jesus Christ worthy enough to share their blood. Just a few years ago, I thought in the race of becoming a good Muslim we have lost touch with humanity. That anyone who does not agree with our faith 100 percent does not deserve a single gesture of sympathy from us. Doing so would tarnish our reputation and may compromise our religiosity. That the God of all universes has opted to limit His blessing to the chosen few who do not obey Him in the first place when it comes to serving their fellow beings. From that point of view, my hope is that this attack jolts us up from our oblivion regarding the rising extremism throughout the country, and the violence unleashed upon minorities in the name of blasphemy and the honour of the Prophet (PBUH).

Overconfident and arrogant, we thought (or maybe we were led to believe) that we have won the war against terror in a matter of weeks just after the first few air strikes and the successful evacuation of the most obvious terrorist hideouts in North Waziristan. The truth, on the contrary, is that the two superpowers in the last three decades have lost the same war using the same strategies that we are employing nowadays: heavy airstrikes, then tank fires followed by troop invasion without focusing on the ideology that drives the terrorists in the first place. What happens then must not surprise us: we take out the enemy here and it sprouts somewhere else in another form, only to be bigger, more powerful and more dangerous. For example, Afghan Mujahedeen end up becoming Taliban and al-Qaeda. We then fight the al-Qaeda and Taliban to deal with the ISIS. Now imagine what is waiting in line after we have got rid of the ISIS. Don’t you think that we need a different strategy?

Shouldn’t we understand that extremists win the war based on an inflammable but an effective ideology and can be defeated only with an equally powerful ideology that proposes peace and tolerance? We have not built that perspective yet. Not only us, the whole world has failed to provide an attractive and meaningful plan of action to fight it off. We can bomb them all we want, and we have done that in Tripoli, Baghdad and Kabul, but in the absence of a revolutionary rhetoric that challenges the jihadi mindset on religious grounds, future bombings will also fail to yield positive results as they have failed in the past. And trust me, whether these bombs are fired by a Pakistani jet or shot by an American plane, the result would be the same.

Having said that, I am not favouring any negotiations with them, I never have. I think force needs to be applied, but force alone is not sufficient, and that is my point. It has to be substantiated with an effective philosophy. To put things more in perspective, we need a military operation to deal with the planners and supporters of the Lahore attack; however for the 80,000 people who gathered in Islamabad or attended the funeral of Mumtaz Qadri, an army operation will only lead to civil war. For that we need to change the mindset of a significant portion of the nation. How? Through proper education, national discourse and the involvement of clerics. We will have to talk to them in the language that they understand, not in the language we think they should understand.

The writer is a US-based freelance columnist. He tweets at @KaamranHashmi and can be reached at skamranhashmi@gmail.com