Peshawar Massacre: Who will avenge our children, and how?

In Peshawar, the Army Public School must have been a prestigious institution. A place in the school will ensure good education fit for middle-class children. Today the school was attacked by seven Taliban terrorists who probably never saw the inside of a proper school. They went around asking who were the children of Army personnel and shot them dead. This must have been tiresome and slow as many children were not from  military families. Then, they killed indiscriminately.
 

In anger and desperation, I followed the twitter feed and various websites for more details. With each update, the count increased, my heart sank lower and lower.

 

I  remembered today a retired Christian officer from Pakistan Army and two civilians who I met a long time ago. He was a proud cavalry man if I remember correctly, the two civilians were much more intriguing.
 

In the early-1990s, in my college days I had the opportunity to spend some days in a Pakistan Army guest house in Rawalpindi. It was adjacent to the 'Artillary Mess' which offered lounging and dining for the officers. Here I met Major Anthony. He must have been in his late 60s then. He told me the stories of his younger days, when he used to study at Gordon College, run by the Christian missionaries in Rawalpindi. He used to be a long distance runner in his college days. The college was famous for its sporting and academic excellence. He remembered fondly how the students finally persuaded an ageing professor to get married. They found him a match, another teacher from Lahore. They celebrated the marriage in style. The whole college went to Lahore and brought Mrs Professor back in the best wedding precession he Anthony ever took part in.
 

'Those were the good old days'. He used to say.

 

He never mentioned the nationalization of the college in the 70s and its inevitable decline. Anthony also remembered vividly his great luck, when as a young officer in the Army, he was appointed as the protocol officer to the visiting Queen Elizabeth during the Ayub Khan dictatorship.

 

'Those were the good old days', he would say.

 

Then his conversation would move to how he lives his retired life in peace and how his wife is still enamoured with the Royal family and collects all the memorabilia she can get her hands on.
 

I remember him well, because I never met anyone like him since. I met other Pakistani Christians, mostly from disadvantaged backgrounds. And I felt ashamed to see their plight. Post-Islamization era Pakistan is no place for minorities. No respect, no life.


In the same Army mess, I once saw two young men. Confident, educated and civilians. One day, they dropped by for a cup of tea with a friend, and they found me in the sitting room watching TV. Greetings were exchanged. They wore shalwar qameez and waist-coats and had beards. I knew the type from my personal experience. Middle class, religious types. 'Jamaat-e-Islami' types. I sat with them while they chatted away with their friend. One of them mentioned the conspiracies being hatched against the Ummah by the Jews. It was a common excuse for all the misfortunes of Pakistan.

One of the bearded gentlemen mentioned the Protocol of the elders of Zion. 'They (Jews)  buy out all the copies of the book as soon as it is published'. I had heard of the book and must have read about its content by that age, but never took it too seriously. But this man was making his argument with such force that I still remember the whole meeting. Both of the visitors believed in a global conspiracy, Pakistan being its prime target. They left after tea. Their friend who remained behind mentioned that both his friends were in ISI, the Inter Services Intelligence agency.
 

There was a Pakistan where Major Anthony thrived, made a life and retired with honour and dignity. And then there was a Pakistan of conspiracy theorists, religious zealots who fantasized themselves to be playing a great game.

And these middle-class Jamaatia types had now a foothold in Pakistani deep state. ISI was swamped by such ideological zealots, both uniformed and civilians. Zia era Islamization had a profound impact on the composition of the ranks in Pakistan Army. Megalomaniacs like ISI's DG, Gen. Hameed Gull inherited the hubris of Afghan 'Jihad' victory and created a monster which no one could tame, even the ISI.

As a college and university student, I witnessed the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and its slow creep into Pakistan from the frontier region. Like a damp patch on a wall, it keeps growing, gathering mould. Taliban  were now accepted as genuine and rightful rulers of Afghanistan. ISI had its allies providing the much needed strategic depth against India, while they kept mutilating and maiming the minds of a whole generation of Afghans and Pakistanis.

The generals who resisted a coup during the successive, spineless democratic governments had kept a strong control on all the things that mattered to them. They nurtured a poisoned generation which fought a proxy war in Kashmir. I knew another middle-class Jamaatia-type in university who trained for Jihad over the summer holiday and was killed while crossing the line of control in Kashmir. I knew many more who didn't want to go, but were happy to glorify those 'brothers' who went and became martyrs.

There are Jamaatia types and then there are the Taliban types. Jamaatias are middle-class, educated, from the urban centers of Punjab and KPK. They are happy to facilitate the lesser classes to pick up the gun and fight for whichever Jihad is underway at the time, the Taliban types; from the tribal belt or rural Punjab. They are the side product of a village welfare system, where the Madrassah takes on the surplus child from a poor family. The child eats leftovers, gets abused and radicalized.

The same abused, radicalized children grew up, and in the name of a fantasy cause, murdered over a hundred middle-class children in cold blood in Peshawar yesterday.

Pakistan seems to have woken up after this massacre. Only a year ago, the same city saw over 120 Christian worshippers killed in a similar attack on All Saints Church. But no one cares for them. No revenge for the Christians. Almost 100 Ahmadis perished in Lahore in 2010, and it went unpunished even when one of the assailants was handed over to the police.

There will be revenge for the children, for right or wrong reason. This will bring an end to the Taliban fundamentalist at least in the tribal areas for now.

But who will punish the middle-class Jamaati types who have caused this mess in the first place?

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Follow me @lutfislam 

Kashmir, Pakistan and Ahmadis: Paranoia of Daily Ummat

For the wise and more astute among us, if we spot a blatant lie in a publication, we can safely assume that the writer's opinion cannot be trusted on other matters as well. The website irshad.org has been in the business of slander and abuse for many years now. For those who don't know, this US based website is dedicated to anti-ahmadiyya propaganda. Almost all of the material on this website is a copy-paste job from other existing literature which is not a surprise.

For example, in this translated article from Daily Ummat from 1997, the author Farooq Ali has made some very interesting claims. Now almost 15 years later, let us revisit these claims to see what time and internet have made apparent to us.

Ummat is the propaganda rag of Jamaat-e-Islami, the right-wing religio-fascist movement started by Abul Aala Maudoodi, who was a religious scholar of some merit but much disliked by the orthodox Sunni sects. Maudoodi's religious thought was shaped by rationalist apolgetics of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. But Maudoodi's political thought bound him strongly to Syed Qutb's pan-Islamism which manifested itself in the creation of JI in 1941. JI has been on the forefront of pro-Jihad movements since 1970s which resulted in gross human rights atrocities in East Pakistan through their militant wing. During the soviet invasion, JI was heavily involved in Afghan war and Gen Zia's Islamization. Thanks to their contributions along with Deobandi seminaries and petro-dollars, Daily Ummat was never short of the headlines narrating the heroics of the Mujahideen during the 1980s. After the war, JI was recruited to contribute to the Jihad in Kashmir by Pakistani Military establishment. What was once a genuine indigenous and rightful freedom struggle now became a proxy war. While JI was busy destroying the Kashmir cause, its leadership forgot that their founder had forbidden the Jihad to defend innocent Kashmiris in 1948 and was duly arrested on the orders of then Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan.

The author of the article in question alleges that Ahmadiyya Muslim Community has been busy in subversive activities against Islam and Pakistan. The evidence was apparently a report submitted to then Government of Pakistan about a terrorist cell established in Qadian, India. Such was the authenticity of this report that nothing came of it since. Not a single document, photograph, audio or video recording, confession of a captured miscreant was ever produced by this esteemed newspaper to prove it. Such is the nature of this poisonous propaganda, that due to religious bigotry, its readers believe in such lies. We now know fully well who is behind the brutal murders of Pakistanis, civilians and military persons alike. Daily Ummat may not admit to it, but a number of high value Al-Qaeda targets were apprehended or killed at the properties owned by JI officials. 

The author is obviously addressing the Pakistani establishment or the time to remain paranoid about Ahmadis. And as with every right-wing conspiracy, its convenient to throw in a few RAW references and links to India and NGOs for good measure. I will ignore them as history and our understanding of it has moved on in the past two decades.

The article is ridiculously compilation of lies and twisted facts. To dismiss a conspiracy theory we must treat it like a poorly tailored article of clothing. Lies stick out of it like loose threads. You pick on one of them and it comes undone. For example:

Lie #1: In 1947 the Ahmadiyya Khalifa asked the boundary commission to consider Ahmadis as a separate faith to ensure Gurdaspur district stayed with India.  

The fact is that the Ahmadiyya Jamaat made a separate representation (as a Muslim sect) at the commission to strengthen Pakistan's claim on Gurdaspur. Due to a very slim Muslim majority in the district, it was important that a strong arguments were presented in favour of Gurdaspur's inclusion in Pakistan. With this in mind the Ahmadiyya delegation asked Qadian to be designated a Muslim Holy Site of great importance to its members and thus to be included in Pakistan. This was done because Indian National Congress had made a similar argument to lay claim on Sikh holy sites which are now in Pakistan.

Daily Ummat also ignores the fact that while Maudoodi was adamant to oppose the idea of Pakistan, it was Ahmadiyya Jamaat which supported the Muslim League and Jinnah in all manners possible.

Recently released proceedings of the in-camera sessions of Pakistani Parliament in 1974 also reveal that this question was raised by Yahya Bakhtyar and answered by the Ahmadiyya delegation.

Lie #2: Sir Zafrulla Khan did not represent the Muslim case honestly.

Sir Zafrulla Khan

This matter was settled by the Munir Commission report of 1954 . Justice Muneer was a member of the Muslim League delegation at the boundary commission and he testified to the excellent work done by Sir. Zafrulla in his report.

Lie #3: Kashmir Committee was a conspiracy to claim Jammu and Kashmir for the Ahmadiyya Community.

The author's reasons for this are absurd. He could only think of one fact that Jesus is buried in Srinagar according to the Ahmadiyya belief and somehow Ahmadis deemed it important enough to conspire a Muslim political revival in the region. How ridiculous is this?

The fact is that decades of relentless oppression of Kashmiris was ignored by the Indian Muslim politicians until it was raised by the Khalifatul Masih II. He not only influenced the Indian Muslim leaders to rally around him to inform the country of the human rights situation in the state, but also provided legal help, education and political organization to Kashmiris to defend their rights. Kashmir committee was the reason Kashmiri's have a political voice today.

Sir Zafrulla Khan presented the case for Kashmir at the UN with such force that Indian delegate was considered to be defeated by those present at the security council. Some US diplomatic correspondence on this matter also sheds light on the impact made by Sir Zafrulla in those years.

It is also odd that the author focuses on the tomb of Jesus as a main reason for Ahmadi interest in Kashmir, yet later insists on Christian-Ahmadi conspiracy against Pakistan. If it is about shared beliefs, Christians will find more common grounds with Daily Ummat as both of them believe Jesus to be alive in heavens.

Further reading:

Daily Ummat at it again. Urdu
Ahrari intrigues to derail Kashmir freedom struggle as outlined by Ayesha Jalal