This code has come under more and more pressure as the ‘Gulfisation’ of the country continues at a rampant pace. This process is not restricted to a Kuwait hairdresser cropping up in one corner of a street in Lahore and a Dhahran tuition centre opening up as a tribute to the days its owner spent in the land of the ‘originals’ to earn his bread and butter. Gulfisation of Pakistani society has many faces. Some of these manifestations are very ugly and the state is complicit.
At the press conference a day after the attack on Data Darbar, it was the turn of the leaders of the Sunni Ittehad Council to point out the patronage that some extremist elements are still getting from the government and the officials who represent it. The leaders were categorical in dismissing the current incumbents’ claim to rule, at the same time blaming countries from the Gulf for funding extremist ideas in Pakistan. In a few sentences, the Sunni Ittehad Council brought out the dilemma of the Pakistani people who have to pay a huge price for their own and their political leaderships’ relations with foreigners who have always found reason to call for religion-based social reform to cleanse the Pakistani civilisation.
Wherever you go in Lahore today, discussions about terrorism are centred on foreigners. Usually, the reference is to India, to the Zionist lobby, and to America, its war on terror and the consequences of this war for Pakistanis. Ideologically, the anti-America talk makes as much sense as popular anti-hegemony theories based on the concepts of true independence have always done. This is not to say that the people are unaware of other foreign influences that have of late affected their lives in a big way. They are simply reluctant to speak out for fear of breaching the purist code and find it convenient to vent their spleen on the single imperialist power.
As the two dominating patterns — one from the Gulf and the other from the West — threaten to take over their civilisation, they silently await a Pakistani answer that only ideal and elusive economic independence can generate.
Blame it on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s pan-Islamist times or pin it on Gen Ziaul Haq’s need for finding a purist version of religion. The consequences of the Pakistani state’s policies have been too dangerous for us to treat them as merely something that happened in the past. The current reality is that, having conceded the high moral ground to a minority group that arbitrates as the guardian of our faith, the state is today too weak to tackle the violence-mongers present in the same minority group. Worse, scratch the surface, and you will find that the state actors are still striving to protect the interests of these appointed guardians, out of political expediency, in good faith or simply out of fear.Now if the state actors are forced to do it out of political expediency, does it mean that their actions only mirror the Pakistani people’s preferences and aspirations? It will be useless to outright reject the argument that society here has turned more ‘fundamentalist’ with time, just as it is preposterous to equate the trends in Pakistani society with, and have them conform to, our appointed moral guardians’ insistence on imposing their system on us, often through coercion and failing that, through violence.
The gathering at Data’s Darbar within hours of the Thursday night attack once again brings to the fore the large peace-loving majority that has been shedding tears and protesting as their icons have come under attack from the invaders one after another. Silently, they have been gathering the fragments after each attack. They are back to their deviant ways at the Bari Imam shrine which was devastated by a bomb attack in May 2005 and they are building Rehman Baba’s dargah brick by brick after it was blown up in March 2009.
They may be lacking in firepower to match the resourcefulness of the so-called purist minority that is hell-bent on charting a short cut to heaven through violent means. However, their return to the centuries-old Data Darbar in a manner as if dictated by nature restores the confidence that they can withstand the current invasion of their lives.
The people have shown a will and it is time for the governments to reciprocate and reassure not through words alone but through actions. We have marked them for operating in an uncertain way, their functions hampered by the perceived interests of the state and self. This entails, willy-nilly, a strategy that has to fall back on material means to fight the monster of terrorism. Even on this count, the stress is on unimaginatively injecting money into the counter-crime or counter-terrorism apparatus and hoping that this in itself will contain the violence (without necessarily affecting the perpetrators to the extent where they become useless for future endeavours for which the state may require them).
The financial grants to the police have been increased manifold and there are forever calls for more funds from foreign donors who have enough reasons to feel wary — even scared — of terrorism bred in this particular part of the world. But there is no evidence so far that the people in charge are working on perfecting a system that will give them the edge that a functioning state must always have over those who challenge its writ and those who disobey its orders. In the event, the only assurance that is from time to time held out to the people is that, if someone has to die, it is going to be the policeman, who is then compensated with the money that the state has put aside for ‘countering terrorism’.
What should be a line of defence is thus reduced to an assembly line of men ready to be sacrificed. Precious lives are lost, and exposed are the very people these defenders are ostensibly there to protect.
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