Our real ‘jugular’ | Pakistan Today | Latest news | Breaking news | Pakistan News | World news | Business | Sport and Multimedia

Our real ‘jugular’ | Pakistan Today | Latest news | Breaking news | Pakistan News | World news | Business | Sport and Multimedia:

Our real ‘jugular’

News Comments (17)

By:Nazir NajiWednesday, 4 Apr 2012 9:50 pm | Comments (17)

What we have done to Gilgit-Baltistan

Like today’s politicians and strategic experts do not know how Balochistan came to be a part of Pakistan, they similarly do not know how Gilgit-Baltistan came to be apart of Pakistan. For the sake of recall, Gilgit-Baltistan used to be a part of the Kashmir state that the people freed from Dogra raj. Post-independence, the people of GB voluntarily decided to join the federation of Pakistan and wanted to be given the status of a federating units like the others. But the then rulers of Pakistan, pleading on the basis of the lack of an administrative infrastructure, stated that they would have to be part of the Pakistan federation for the time being without being declared a separate province. They would be given that due status once the requisite administrative infrastructure was in place. Given our national predilection for amnesia, no one remembered this pledge even though the people of GB constantly kept reminding governments and repeatedly asked for recognition of their identity. In 1963, an important part of GB was given under the control of China without asking from the people. Given their allegiance to and love for Pakistan, the local populace accepted this unjust decision. Finally, the incumbent government came through on the historical promise of giving them provincial status.

It is pertinent to mention here that it is the people of GB, after the people of East Pakistan, who fought their war of independence themselves, got their freedom and joined Pakistan of their own volition. Of Pakistan’s current territory, there was widespread disagreement in the then province of NWFP. The Red Shirts movement boycotted the referendum and because of that boycott, the province became a part of Pakistan after the referendum. The Sindh Assembly had passed a resolution in favour of Pakistan but there was no noteworthy expression of desire from the people there. The province became a part of Pakistan according to the plan of partition. The resolution that had been passed in 1938, in fact was passed in the assembly of the province formed after separation from the Bombay presidency. During the elections for this assembly, the issue of Pakistan had never come up. The resolution was passed 1938 whereas the resolution for Pakistan was presented in 1940.

Similarly, the Pakistan movement in Punjab was also restricted to a few days. The elections that took place in Punjab before independence, the Muslim League had not gotten a majority in them. Along with Hindus and Sikh, the party of the Punjabi feudals, the Unionist Party, formed a coalition government and the chief ministership was given to Khizar Hayat Tiwana. During this time, the movement for Pakistan had already gained steam. Thus, the Muslim League also protested against that government in Punjab and registered their participation in the Pakistan movement. Some Muslim Leaguers were arrested. Some feudals also had an R&R session as jailbirds. But this agitation in Punjab wasn’t even a miniscule portion of the entirety of the Pakistan movement and the sacrifices rendered for it. Punjab’s English governor hinted to all the Unionists that since the Pakistan movement was about to achieve its end, it was better for them to join the ML. And as the night fell, all the Unionist became Leaguers and West Punjab became a part of Pakistan. If Punjab had prepared it case to present to the Radcliffe Award, then Ferozepur and Gurdaspur could have become parts of Pakistan. Batala especially would never have gone to India. But the Punjabi Muslim League was barely able to fight its own case properly which is an indication of its seriousness of purpose.

However, returning to the point I was making, it was the people of East Pakistan that had rendered the most sacrifices for the creation of Pakistan and after them, the people of GB who got their territory freed from an oppressor and joined Pakistan. The decision about East Pakistan was also taken by people who had no remarkable contribution to the creation of Pakistan. And now what is being done in GB is also being done by elements who never fought for the cause of Pakistan.

What did we lose after losing East Pakistan? Those who are pushing this country deep into a quagmire in the name of Islam still have no idea about how grave that loss was. The leadership of East Pakistan would never have let Pakistan be embroiled in the Afghan war. The Kashmir problem would possibly have been solved. Just like India, Pakistan would be on the road to rapid development. We would be standing with dignity in the comity of nations. Our society would have been free from the scourge of violence. No OBL would have been ensconced safely in our quarters and no Hafiz Saeed would have had the gall to support foreign terrorists. We have seen all this because we let East Pakistan go. And what is happening in GB now, if I allude even perfunctorily to it, it would scare the daylights out of most.

Consider: What is the geographical location of GB? On the one hand, it joins with KP and on the other with Azad Kashmir. The Karakoram Highway passes through it and that is where our and China’s territories meet. North to that is Wakhan strip which is a part of Afghanistan. But this is the area which directly joins Pakistan to the landmass of Central Asia. China is conducting many great developmental worksin GB. China is going to build a big water reservoir in this area, 80 percent of the expenditure for which China will bear itself. This Chinese reservoir will act like a lifeline for our Daimer-Basha dam. If this reservoir is not built, the Daimer-Basha dam will be but a pipedream. You must also know that the fountainhead of our aquatic lifeline i.e. the River Indus is also situated in GB.

I wrote in my previous column that if any flight from Indian territory to Afghanistan were to take fifteen minutes, it would be from this area. You fly from Occupied Kashmir to GB from where you fly to Wakhan in a matter of minutes. Now look at our relations with India and the US. Look at their capabilities and look at our own and you will clearly know what I am worried about. If we lose control over GB, the one that we never actually established, what would be the consequences for that?

Eighty percent of GB’s people belong to the Fiqh Ja’afria. They are a peaceful people. During Zia-ul-Haq’s reign, the Sipah-e-Sahaba started terrorist activities in the region which have now gained a lot of momentum. Gilgit has been in a curfew for the last three days. Corpses litter the roads and no one dare pick them up. Sectarian hatred is fermenting in South Punjab and our tribal areas and reaching that region. Kashmir is the ‘jugular vein’ without which we have been living for 64 years. But if some enemy gets hold of our jugular vein of GB, we will definitely not have 64 years…

The writer is one of Pakistan’s most widely read columnists.

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Of ISI & Legends; Why Ahmad Shuja Pasha will Never Walk Alone | PKKH.tv

Of ISI & Legends; Why Ahmad Shuja Pasha will Never Walk Alone | PKKH.tv:

Of ISI & Legends; Why Ahmad Shuja Pasha will Never Walk Alone

Submitted by Tair-e-Lahoti on March 18, 2012 – 12:16 pm32 Comments

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Dan Qayyum and Kulsoom Khan  ||  PKKH.tv

Few people are aware of the real force and brains behind the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in the 80s.

General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, former Director General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (1979 to 1987), is rightfully accredited with master-minding the Afghan Jihad against former superpower the Soviet Union. It was his lethal combination of power, intelligence, and foresight that made him the true architect of Soviet defeat and it’s withdrawal inevitable. The general’s unwavering support for the Afghan mujahideen, fueled by Saudi and American financial assistance managed to force out the Soviets from Afghanistan, eventually leading to irrepairable fissures within the Union and it’s long awaited fall, all the while keeping CIA infiltration and influence at bay.

During the tenure of General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, ISI nurtured mujahideen in madrassas (religious seminaries ) along Pakistan’s tribal belt. The Pakistani army generals were put in charge of training these guerilla fighters, instilling in them the required skills to devise military strategies and defend their their homeland from the Soviets. In the mid 80s, ISI was not only supplying logistical support but had sent Pakistani soldiers to fight alongside the mujahideen, in guerilla garb. Some reports also say that in 1986 the ISI sent atleast three attack squads into former Soviet lands comprising of around 20 Pakistan army soldiers, to destroy arms dumps and convoys headed for Afghanistan. The Americans, upon finding out, beseeched General Zia to stop their incursion into Soviet territory as it could trigger an all-out conflict between the Americans and the Soviets, who were suspecting these raids as by-product of American incitement.

The ISI’s successful military operation against Soviet aggression did not go unacknowledged. General Rtd Hamid Gul, who was appointed the next Director General of ISI in the wake of General Akhtar Abdul Rahman’s assasination in 1989, was sent a piece of the Berlin Wall with a plaque honouring ‘those who struck the first blow’.

Fast forward to the year 2012, Afghanistan is once again under occupation, and eleven years since the US occupation began, remains unconquerable. And if American allegations are to be believed, ISI’s outgoing Director General Ahmad Shuja Pasha (recently named in the ‘TIME Magazine 100 Most Influential people’ list) has for the last four years followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, General Akhtar Abdur Rehman.

Today, on the day of his retirement, Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha stands accused of harboring, training, and arming the mujahideen fighting the occupying US forces in Afghanistan during his four year tenure. Western media, analysts and military officials are increasing the pressure on Pakistan, pinning the blame of American and NATO failure on ISI. Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency is described in the media as a state within a state, running its own policy in Afghanistan, contrary to the US-sponspored ‘democratic’ government’s subservient doctrine. Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha is to Americans what Gen. Akhtar Abdul Rahman was to the Soviets. The grand puppet-master, calling the shots and directing attacks on the occupying forces and slowly but surely griding their hopes of domination in this key region, into the dusty plains of Afghanistan.

Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the US Joints Chiefs of Staff, told the US Senate Armed Services Committee last year that he believes the Afghan mujahideen to be a ‘veritable arm’ of the ISI. He also alleged that the ISI planned and conducted various attacks on US forces inside Afghanistan, including the September 14th assault on the US Embassy in Kabul.
Other high-profile attacks accredited to the ISI and the Pakistani military include last year’s assault on the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul, as well as the Indian Embassy blast in Kabul in 2009.

One of the victims of an attack on the Indian Embassy in 2009 was the Indian Defence Attache, Brigadier R. D. Mehta, whose list of ‘credentials’ include heading the Indian Army’s notoriously brutal Intelligence wing for Jammu and Kashmir – responsible for thousands of enforced disappearances and extra judicial murders of innocent Kashmiris in the last two decades. His presence in Afghanistan, assisting with training the Afghan National Army, illustrated India’s influence in Afghanistan;s government and military circles. If there is truth in American allegations, then it is this particular incident which is of more significance than others.

Pakistan was one of the three countries who recognized the government of Taliban as legitimate, the others being Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The ISI had supported Taliban’s takeover of Kabul from the Indian sponsored Ahmad Shah Massoud and his Northern Alliance a few years earlier. According to Pakistan’s then-dictator Pervez Musharraf, all it took was a phonecall from the then US secretary of State Colin Powell for this relationship to come crashing down shortly after 9/11. Musharraf neither matched his predecessors in intelligence nor in loyalty, and eventually caved under American pressure, agreeing on assisting the US occupy and overthrow the Taliban government. In view of intense US and international pressure, Pakistan’s foreign policy made a complete u-turn concerning ‘former’ ally, the Taliban.

In the months and years to follow, the Pakistani military planners watched in horror as the US stubbornly displayed its utter disregard for its supposed ‘front line ally’s national security interests by supporting the Indian / Iranian-backed Northern Alliance for leading the new Afghan interm government, which later got itself ‘elected’ for more terms and continues to hold office ten years since the occupation began. The past decade under Karzai’s government has seen a long list of unending atrocities and blows to Pakistan’s security – including infestation of Pakistan with spies and undercover agents, bribing and buying out top shelf news media and talk show anchors and media houses in order to promote US agendas in Pakistan, drone strikes and air assaults killing hundreds of civilians and Pakistan army soldiers, thousands of civilians and military deaths in violence and terror attacks – just a few examples of American treachery that come to mind.

As the blood-soaked years dragged on, Pakistan’s worst fears had come true as Afghan territory was now being used to launch a ruthless and bloody terror campaign in Pakistan’s major cities. Weapons and funds flowed in from Afghanistan while terrorists struck with impunity in Pakistan, attacking busy markets, mosques, and military bases. Another Baloch ‘insurgency’ (originally initiated in the 1970s by the Soviets using Indian covert agents and long dead since the Soviet pullout) was revived under CIA’s umbrella. Pakistan’s requests to the CIA of putting a leash on Indian agencies active in Afghanistan kept falling on deaf ears, and continue to do so.

Americans allege that it was around 2005-06, during the reign of General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani as the ISI Chief (now COAS) when they first started recieving intelligence reports implicating the ISI in attacks on American and Indian interests in Afghanistan. Kayani, after being promoted to the COAS role in October 2007, appointed Ahmad Shuja Pasha as his ISI Chief. If American accusations are to be lent any credibility, then this duo has not only revived covert Pakistani support for Afghan resistance, but has also caused billions of dollars in economic damage to the US and undone years of hard intelligence networking by curtailing CIA’s influence and sending back hundreds of US contractors and covert agents in the last year and a half. Any such action from Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies – if the allegations were true – would be justified by what an overwhelming majority of Pakistan’s citizens see as treachery and backstabbing by the Americans by allowing India – which does not share a border with landlocked Afghanistan – a slice of the Afghan pie.

If the mutual mistrust and covert action on both sides of the border wasn’t enough, the situation was further complicated by a number of events last year, including the arrest (and later release) of a US army contractor – found with a phone book full of numbers of known terrorists and their cohorts and a camera containing photos of sensitive military installations in Pakistan. Then there was ofcourse the May 2nd raid by American forces on a house in Abbotabad using stealth helicopters which apparently took out Osama Bin Laden, and finally the unprovoked attack on a Pakistan military outpost in Salala, near the Afghan border, in which 24 Pakistani soldiers embraced Shahadat after coming under fire from a US helicopter.

These incidents, while they aggravated public opinion in Pakistan even more against the US occupation of Afghanistan, also provided a golden opportunity to Shuja Pasha to further curtail CIA’s tentacles in Pakistan. All non-essential CIA staff and defence contractors have been sent packing. Information gleaned by CIA contractor Raymond Davis enabled Pakistan to make hundreds of arrests and shut down CIA’s local information and covert action cells. And after the November 26th attack on Salala post least year, Pakistan army took another significant step towards formally end the partnership with the US occupation, by shutting down the land route from its port in Karachi, which was used to deliver thousands of containers daily to the US forces in Afghanistan.

All of this after Pakistan army, under the leadership of Kayani and guidance of Pasha has already broken the back of the terrorists on its soil in recent years, freeing up large swathes of territory in the tribal badlands and in Swat where the terrorists had established their mini fiefdoms.

There are many reasons why Pasha is said to have been one of CIA’s most hated men, chief among them being that it was during his tenure when relations between Pakistan and US soured and mistrust on both sides eventually led to further deterioration. It was also under his tenure that CIA’s networks of informants and covert agents were unravelled and a number of key CIA assets (if not all) were neutralized. It was in a meeting with the then CIA Director Leon Panetta after the raid on Abbotabad last year, when Pasha is said to have brushed off his counterpart’s threatening tone by retorting that his ‘Boss is Allah, not America’. The sigh of relief brought on by Pasha’s retirement can be heard from Langley right through to Delhi.

As Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha steps down from his post today, it is fair to ponder if there is truth in the American allegations of the ISI’s role. Because if they are true, and if Pasha and Kayani have been giving the Americans a bloody nose in return for what Pakistanis see as backstabbing by the Americans, if Shuja Pasha has indeed followed in ISI tradition of bringing down superpowers by giving the US another Vietnam, and if his planning, intelligence and audacity has brought the US military might close to annihiliation in the unforgiving terrain of Afghanistan, then there will be millions of Pakistanis who will always view this man as a Hero. Alongside General Akhtar Abdul Rahman.

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Ahmadis and Shias- Run for Your Life, Islam and Sectarianism, Pervez Hoodbhoy, New Age Islam

Ahmadis and Shias- Run for Your Life, Islam and Sectarianism, Pervez Hoodbhoy, New Age Islam:

Ahmadis and Shias- Run for Your Life

By Pervez Hoodbhoy

March 4, 2012

Eighteen bloodied bodies, shot Gestapo-style, lay by the roadside. Men in army uniforms had stopped four buses bound from Rawalpindi to Gilgit, demanding that all 117 persons on board alight. Those with Shia sounding names on their national identification cards were separated out. Minutes later it was all over; the earlier massacres of Hazara Shias in Mastung and Quetta had been repeated.

Having just learned of the fresh killings, I relayed the news on to colleagues and students at the cafeteria table. Some looked glumly at their plates but, a minute or two later, normal cheerful chatter resumed. What to do? With so many killings, taking things too seriously can be bad for one’s mental health.

In Pakistan one’s religious faith, or lack of one, has become sufficient to warrant execution and murder. The killers do their job fearlessly and frequently. The 17th century philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, once observed that “men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it for religious conviction”.

Equipped with just enough religion to hate those with another faith — but not enough to love their coreligionists — Pakistanis have mostly turned their backs on religious atrocities. Exceptionally grotesque ones, such as when 88 Ahmadis quietly praying in Lahore on a Friday were turned into corpses, have also failed to inspire public reaction. Mass executions do not interest Pakistan’s religious parties, or Imran’s Khan’s PTI. For them, only the killings by American drones matter.

The title of this essay deliberately excludes Hindus, Christians, and Parsis. The reason: these communities were never enthused about India’s partition (even though some individual members pretended to be). Indeed, they were soon slapped with the Objectives Resolution of 1949 which termed them “minorities”, hence freaks and outcasts dispatched to the margins. Some accepted their fate, keeping a low profile. Others altered their names to more Muslim sounding ones. The better off or more able ones emigrated, taking valuable skills along with them.

But with Shias and Ahmadis it was different. Whatever they might feel now, they were enthusiastic about Pakistan. Mr Jinnah, born a Gujrati Shia Muslim, believed that Muslims and Hindus could never live together peacefully but that Muslims, of course, could. Chaudhry Zafarullah Khan, an Ahmadi leader, was commended by Jinnah for having eloquently argued the Two-Nation theory, and then appointed by him in 1947 as Pakistan’s first foreign minister. Mr Jinnah died early, but Zafarullah Khan lived long enough to see disillusionment. The inevitable had happened: once the partition was complete, the question of which version of Islam was correct became bitterly contentious.

Until recently, Pakistan’s Shias did not have the self-image of a religious minority. They had joined Sunnis in supporting Mr Bhutto’s 1974 decision to declare Ahmadis as non-Muslim. But now they are worried. The Tribal Areas are convulsed in sectarian warfare: Kurram, Parachinar and Hangu (in the settled districts) are killing grounds for both Sunni and Shia, but with most casualties being Shia. City life has also become increasingly insecure and segregated; Karachi’s Shia neighborhoods are visibly barricaded and fortified.

But while Shias are numerous enough to put up a defence, Ahmadis are not. Last month, a raging 5,000-strong mob descended upon their sole worship place in Satellite Town, Rawalpindi. Organised by the Jamaat-i-Islami, various leaders from Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Sipah-e-Sahaba addressed the rally demanding the worship place’s security cameras and protective barricades be removed. The police agreed with the mob’s demands, advising the Ahmadis to cease praying. The worship place has now been closed down.

Forbidden from calling themselves Muslims, Ahmadi children are expelled from school once their religion is discovered. Just a hint may be enough to destroy a career. Knowing this, the school staff at a high school in Mansehra added the word ‘Qadiani’ to the name of an Ahmadi student, Raheel Ahmad, effectively eliminating the boy’s chances of getting a university education. The same school also held an anti-Ahmadi programme, distributing prizes to winners.

The latest outrage is that new ID cards, issued by the Punjab government, require the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) to insert a ‘Qadiani’ entry in the online forms. Ahmadis now do not have the option of declaring themselves non-Muslims. Instead the government demands that they open themselves to public persecution, a method that Nazi Germany used against Jews.

Even dead Ahmadis are not spared: news had reached the Khatm-e-Nabuwat that Nadia Hanif, a 17-year old school teacher who had died of illness ten days ago, was actually an Ahmadi but buried in a Muslim graveyard in Chanda Singh village, Kasur. Her grave was promptly dug up, and the body removed for reburial.

Pakistan’s state apparatus, for all its tanks and guns, offers no protection to those deemed as religious minorities. Is it just weakness? Or, perhaps, complicity? While swarms of intelligence agents can be seen in many places, they fail spectacularly to intercept religious terrorists. More ominously, recent months have seen state-sanctioned Difa-e-Pakistan Council (DPC) rallies across the country, drawing many tens of thousands. Prominent self-proclaimed Shia and Ahmadi killers, prance on stage while holding hands in a show of unity.

At the Multan DPC rally on February 17, Khatm-e-Nabuwat leaders bayed for Ahmadi blood while sharing the stage with the famed Malik Ishaq, a self-acclaimed Shia-killer. Newspaper reports say Ishaq was freed last year after frightened judges treated him like a guest in the courtroom, offering him tea and biscuits. One judge attempted to hide his face with his hands. But after Ishaq read out the names of his children, the judge abandoned the trial.

What does the Pakistan Army think it will gain tolerating — or perhaps encouraging — such violent forces once again? Its jawans pay an enormous price in fighting them, and their offshoots, elsewhere in the country. But perhaps the notion that extremists are Pakistan’s ‘strategic assets’ for use in Kashmir and Afghanistan has captured the military’s mind. Or, post-OBL, perhaps a miffed leadership seeks to show anger at the US through such rallies. Whatever the explanation, Pakistan’s minorities face catastrophe.

The writer currently teaches physics and political science at LUMS (Lahore). He taught at Quaid-i-Azam University for 36 years and was head of the physics department.

Source: The Express Tribune

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/islam-and-sectarianism/pervez-hoodbhoy/executions-and-murders-in-pakistan---run-for-your-life/d/6786

IRIN Asia | PAKISTAN: Abducted and forced into a Muslim marriage | Pakistan | Early Warning | Gender Issues | Governance | Health & Nutrition | Human Rights

IRIN Asia | PAKISTAN: Abducted and forced into a Muslim marriage | Pakistan | Early Warning | Gender Issues | Governance | Health & Nutrition | Human Rights:

PAKISTAN: Abducted and forced into a Muslim marriage

Photo: Tariq Saeed/IRIN

Hindus marking a ritual occasion feel increasingly threatened in Pakistan

KARACHI, 27 February 2012 (IRIN) - Sixteen-year-old Ameena Ahmed*, now living in the town of Rahim Yar Khan in Pakistan’s Punjab Province, does not always respond when her mother-in-law calls out to her.

“Even after a year of `marriage’ I am not used to my new name. I was called Radha before,” she told IRIN on a rare occasion when she was allowed to go to the corner shop on her own to buy vegetables.

Ameena, or Radha as she still calls herself, was abducted from Karachi about 13 months ago by a group of young men who offered her ice-cream and a ride in their car. Before she knew what was happening, she was dragged into a larger van, and driven to an area she did not know.

She was then pressured into signing forms which she later found meant she was married to Ahmed Salim, 25; she was converted to a Muslim after being asked to recite some verses in front of a cleric. She was obliged to wear a veil. Seven months ago, Ameena, who has not seen her parents or three siblings since then and “misses them a lot”, moved with her new family to southern Punjab.

"The abduction and kidnapping of Hindu girls is becoming more and more common," Amarnath Motumal, a lawyer and leader of Karachi’s Hindu community, told IRIN. “This trend has been growing over the past four or five years, and it is getting worse day by day.”

He said there were at least 15-20 forced abductions and conversions of young girls from Karachi each month, mainly from the multi-ethnic Lyari area. The fact that more and more people were moving to Karachi from the interior of Sindh Province added to the dangers, as there were now more Hindus in Karachi, he said.

“They come to search for better schooling, for work and to escape growing extremism,” said Motumal who believes Muslim religious schools are involved in the conversion business.

“Hindus are non-believers. They believe in many gods, not one, and are heretics. So they should be converted,” said Abdul Mannan, 20, a Muslim student. He said he would be willing to marry a Hindu girl, if asked to by his teachers, “because conversions brought big rewards from Allah [God]. But later I will marry a `real’ Muslim girl as my second wife,” he said.

According to local law, a Muslim man can take more than one wife, but rights activists argue that the law infringes the rights of women and needs to be altered.

Motumal says Hindu organizations are concerned only with the “forced conversion” of girls under 18. “Adult women are of course free to choose,” he said.

“Lured away”

Sunil Sushmt, 40, who lives in a village close to the city of Mirpurkhas in central Sindh Province, said his 14-year-old daughter was “lured away” by an older neighbour and, her parents believe, forcibly converted after marriage to a Muslim. “She was a child. What choice did she have?” her father asked. He said her mother still cries for her “almost daily” a year after the event.

Sushmat is also concerned about how his daughter is being treated. “We know many converts are treated like slaves, not wives,” he said.

According to official figures, Hindus based mainly in Sindh make up 2 percent of Pakistan’s total population of 165 million. “We believe this figure could be higher,” Motumal said.

According to media reports, a growing number of Hindus have been fleeing Pakistan, mainly for neighbouring India. The kidnapping of girls and other forms of persecution is a factor in this, according to those who have decided not to stay in the country any longer.

“My family has lived in Sindh for generations,” Parvati Devi, 70, told IRIN. “But now I worry for the future of my granddaughters and their children. Maybe we too should leave,” she said. “The entire family is seriously considering this.”

*not her real name

kh/eo/cb

Theme (s): Early Warning, Gender Issues, Governance, Health & Nutrition, Human Rights,

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The Hindu : Opinion / Lead : Prospects of Pakistan's Islamist resurgence

The Hindu : Opinion / Lead : Prospects of Pakistan's Islamist resurgence: zeitgeist

The Hindu

Even though Islamists have enjoyed only limited electoral support, they have shaped the state's destiny. The country's liberal democratic politicians must confront them or prepare to see them take power.

Early in 1939, on the eve of the great war that would lead on to the death of the British empire and the birth of his homeland, the politician and religious ideologue, Abdul Ala Maududi, delivered a lecture that has become a foundational text for South Asia Islamism.

Faith, Maududi insisted, was more than a “hotchpotch of beliefs, prayers and rituals.” Islam was, in fact, “a revolutionary ideology which seeks to alter the social order of the entire world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.” Even the word ‘Muslims', he argued, denoted not a community of believers, but an “international revolutionary party organised by Islam to carry out its revolutionary programme.”

Ever since December, the world has watched, with ever-growing concern, the growing momentum of the Difa-e-Pakistan (Defence of Pakistan) — a new Islamist coalition that represents the full flowering of Maududi's vision.

The party Maududi founded, the Jama'at-e-Islami, is part of the alliance, along with 39 other major and minor political actors. The Maulana Sami-ul-Haq faction of the Jama'at Ullema Islam, representing the Deoband theological tradition, and closely linked to the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, is also a key actor. The movement's backbone, though, is the Jama'at-ud-Dawa, with tens of thousands of volunteers — many of them in the party's sword-arm, the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Later this year, many experts believe, the besieged Pakistan People's Party government is likely to call early elections. The party has been hard hit by corruption allegations, a flailing economy, and the unremitting hostility of the military.

Has the Pakistani Islamist movement's tryst with destiny finally come?

Theatrical performance

“Every city in Pakistan,” Jama'at-e-Islami leader Liaqat Baloch thundered before a giant audience at a Difa-e-Pakistan rally in Karachi this weekend gone by, “will soon become a Tahrir square.” Difa-e-Pakistan leaders have announced they will lay siege to the Parliament building in Lahore later this month. These gestures aren't, as some have suggested, warnings of an impending jihadist coup. Instead, they are theatrical performance aimed at an electoral audience.

It isn't that organisations like the Jama'at-ud-Dawa have dropped their jihadist ambitions. In a recent speech, its chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed claimed that Prophet Muhammad had called for war “against the Hindu, so that the greatness of the jihad can be evident.” Following “the success of this jihad, after the end of Judaism, after the end of Christianity, after the end of obscenity and irreligiousness, Islam will rule the world,” he said.

The resolutions passed in Karachi, though, show the Difa movement isn't just concerned with jihad. It seeks, for example, a rollback of electricity tariffs, a reversal of the privatisation of Karachi's power utility, an end to load-shedding, and the reinstatement of sacked public sector workers.

Gradual evolution

Ever since 2010, this new alliance of the religious right has evolved slowly. That May, for example, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa's Hafiz Abdul Rehman Makki, the Jamaat-e-Islami's Farid Paracha and the Tehreek-e-Insaaf's senior vice-president Ejaz Chaudhury addressed an all-party meeting called to voice anger at India's alleged choking of river waters. Makki, a key Lashkar ideologue, said India was working to “to destroy the next generation of Pakistan.”

In March 2010, a jihadist convention held at Kotli drew speakers from terrorist groups linked to many of the same political formations — using, for the first time, the Difa-e-Pakistan name. The Lashkar's Muzaffarabad-based leader Abdul Wahid Kashmiri addressed the Pakistan government: “you beg water from India, whereas we are battling to levy jizya [a tax on conquered non-Muslims]”.

The same themes have suffused Saeed's speeches since 2006, and earlier, as well as those of others on the religious right-wing. The religious right, however, never succeeded in uniting under a single banner for any length of time.

Now, though, parties like the Jama'at-ud-Dawa have grasped that patronage from Pakistan's militaries isn't a substitute for the acquisition of state power. In turn, the Islamist search for power is being welcomed by a military leadership under fire from a defiant political leadership. Founded on the bedrock of the pious bourgeoisie of businessmen and white-collar employees, a class shut out of a share of power by landed elites and big capitalists, the Islamist has, in recent years, found a wider audience — notably, elements of urban youth and landless peasants with no other language of resistance.

For the most part, commentators have been dismissive of the reach of Pakistani Islamists, noting that their parties have had limited electoral success. This argument is based on the fact that the Islamist parties have never bettered their 1970 electoral performance, when they won 21.6 per cent of the vote. Even in 2002, despite a helping hand from Pakistan's military, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal coalition won less than 11 per cent.

It is worth considering, though, that these figures are not insignificant. The Bahujan Samaj Party won 5.33 per cent of the vote in the 2004 elections, but has transfigured Indian politics. The Islamist vote in 1970 was just one percentage point lower to the Bharatiya Janata Party mandate in 2004.

Even though the electoral clout of religious fundamentalists and Islamists has been limited, their ideological influence has shaped Pakistan's political destiny. In 1949, the Jama'at Ullema Islam, political wing of the Deoband clerics, successfully lobbied for the Objectives Resolution, which decreed that sovereignty belonged to god, rather than people.

From 1951, the Islamist movement began to gather momentum. The Majlis-e-Ahrar, a movement of clerics drawing legitimacy from the Deoband clerical tradition, launched a campaign against the heterodox Ahmadiyya sect. In 1953, large-scale sectarian riots forced the imposition of martial law across Punjab.

Ayub Khan & Islam

General Ayub Khan's military regime, which took power in 1958, sought to roll-back the armies of the pious. He removed the word “Islamic” from Pakistan's name, making it a simple republic. But in 1962, Pakistan's politicians decided General Khan had gone too far, and the country went back to being “Islamic”.

Islamist ideologues began to see electoral democracy as an asset. Maududi continued to condemn what he described as Pakistan's “Hinduistic, western semi-feudalistic and semi-capitalistic foundation.” He thought, however, that democratic mobilisation could bring change. “For this,” he wrote in 1960, “the first prerequisite would be to acknowledge and restore the sovereignty of god over the state”

Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto realised this desire: his 1973 Constitution declared Islam the state religion, and voided laws repugnant to the Shari'a. Bhutto committed the state to teaching Islam, and set up a Council on Islamic Ideology to bring secular laws into line with religion.

General Zia-ul-Haq's regime, which included the Jama'at-e-Islami, saw the Islamic state consolidate itself, with a new system of theocratic institutions and codes that superseded secular law. He also made the Pakistani state a patron of Islamist causes, notably the jihad in Afghanistan.

Bhutto's testament

Bhutto's death-row testament makes clear General Zia's state emerged from within the dominant zeitgeist. “We were on the verge of full nuclear capability when I left the government to come to this death cell,” the former Prime Minister wrote. “The Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilisations have this capability. Only the Islamic civilisation was without it.”

It is improbable the Difa movement will dethrone Pakistan's democratic establishment, as Gen. Zia did in 1977. President Zardari's government has genuine bases of support. Rural incomes have risen; social security schemes have put cash in the hands of large chunks of the rural poor; landless peasants continue to be bound to the PPP's politicians by ties of deference and economic dependence.

The fact, however, is that Pakistan's democratic politicians have shown no stomach for a frontal confrontation with the ideas of the religious-right — and without this rupture, the growth of Islamist influence will remain inexorable. Pakistani politicians have long thought Islam is the glue that holds the nation together — a quasi-religious faith that has survived the secession of East Pakistan, multiple crises in Balochistan and murderous jihadist violence.

Evidence that liberal-democratic silence is allowing toxic Islamism to suffuse civil society isn't hard to find. Last week, Lahore's bar association barred the sale of soft drinks made by Ahmadiyya-owned firms, while a 14-year-old was imprisoned for flying a kite — a small pleasure the religious right-wing has long railed against.

In the wake of the 1953 crisis, Justice Muhammad Munir and Justice Mohammad Rustam Kayani made this observation: “as long as we rely upon the hammer when a file is needed and press Islam into service to solve situations it was never intended to solve, frustration and disappointment must dog our steps”.

Pakistan's liberal-democratic rulers need to listen to that message.

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Fatima Bhutto on Imran Khan | Sports and Culture Blog

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