:: Balbir Punj

Vote-hungry leaders give in to fundamentalism

Balbir K. Punj

March.3 : Will the virus of "Talibanism" stay confined to the Swat Valley or expand to enclose the rest of Pakistan and spill over to India as well? It’s obvious that interested parties are busy creating an environment conducive to spreading the virus in both the countries. While the state apparatus in Pakistan has been infected with fundamentalism since the days of General Zia-ul Haq, in India pseudo-secularists have been acceding ground to the medieval mindset over a long period.

In the 1920s, Gandhiji supported the Khilafat Movement against a progressive regime in Turkey; in the 1940s, the Communists unabashedly supported Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s demand for a theocratic Pakistan; and since Independence, we ought to be equally concerned about the way Muslim orthodox leaders have succeeded in silencing any questioning about their way of life.

The CPI(M) in Kerala is actively backing the type of Islamic extremism represented by the (Abdul Nasser) Madhani phenomenon — in fact, both the Marxists and the Congress competed to welcome him when he was released from incarceration for allegedly hatching the plot to trigger bomb blasts serial bombing in Coimbatore during Bharatiya Janata Party leader L.K. Advani’s visit in 1999. More importantly, this silencing — whether it is the hounding of Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen or compelling the Kolkata police to arrest Statesman editor and publisher for publishing an article, by Johann Hari, critical of some Islamic practices (Hari also criticised other religions in the article) — is a pointer to the gathering cloud.

In fact, a reading of events over the last several years, where even a hint of reform among Muslims has been resisted and self-styled secularists have supported this resistance, confirms how the mullahs are on ascendances in this country, mainly due to the cowardice of so-called secularists and liberals. The political parties that swear by secularism have no place for reformist Muslim leaders like Arif Mohammed Khan but have place for rabid orthodox people like Mohammad Shahabuddin and former railway minister C.K. Jaffer Sharief. Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh still bats for the Batla House terrorists but does not oppose the Indian Taliban who force Muslim women who have been raped to live with their rapists. Nor does he say a word against the recent practice of divorce through SMS.

Recently, Asiya Andrabi, the head of the radical Islamic women’s outfit Dukhtaran-e-Millat, ordered her promising cricketer-son Mohammad Bin Qasim to withdraw his name from the under-16 Indian cricket squad.

In this election environment, the political class that is competing for the Muslim vote could be expected to compete for appeasement of Islamic orthodoxy also and is thereby keeping quiet over the way the community is being taken over completely by the extremist leadership. Muslim youth from as far as Kerala are sucked into Kashmir militancy via Hyderabad and Pakistan, but leaders like Amar Singh and liberal authors like Arundhati Roy are busy wanting to prove all anti-terror action by the Indian security forces as either anti-Muslim or fake.

There was great thrill among the secularists when a huge congregation of Muslim clerics in Hyderabad condemned terrorism in the name of religion. But no one dared to point out that the same meeting did not disassociate itself from the basic aim of Taliban and its Pakistani and Indian associates. The attempt to oppose use of terror but uphold orthodoxy, often advanced as the ultimate justification for use of terror in the name of God, is a calculated move to confuse public opinion without abandoning the agenda.

And what is the scene in Pakistan? The comparative silence over the deal struck in Swat Valley restoring Sharia law in Pakistan’s civil society, especially the lawyers who were in the lead to end military rule, seems like an approval of the development. Pakistani journalists, no doubt, have vowed to fight for freedom to operate and report but there seems to be no reflection from others. For quite some time in Islamabad, Lahore and other Pakistan cities, the mullah-led crowds have been imposing their own moral code on the hapless people.

In fact, the Swat Valley agreement, arrived at just before Richard Holbrooke’s arrival in Islamabad, is the Pakistan Army’s reply to US President Barack Obama’s call. The Pakistan Army will continue to collaborate with the Taliban to extend an Islamic grip over the region while the Army retains this "asset" (General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani’s words quoted in New York Times’ reporter David Sanger’s book The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power) both to blackmail the civilian government in Islamabad and to continue the expansion of the military’s hold over Pakistan’s economic sinews.

A map of the area shows how the Swat Valley is almost at the Pak-Afghan border and near Islamabad as well. Thus, we would see Taliban in virtual power at the pivot, able to influence events in Afghanistan in the west and Pakistan in the east. The extremists now have a more resourceful and more compact state to grab than what they earlier had in Kabul. How could the civilian government in Islamabad fight back as the Taliban, entrenched in Swat Valley, raise their own "fully Islamic" foothold that becomes a magnet for several other extremist organisations in the rest of Pakistan to demand imposition of a fully Islamic orthodoxy?

The strong chain of madrasas, thanks to the country’s military ruler of the 1980s, would ensure that the civil population — especially the very young — is attuned to the Taliban rules. The agreement has already been consecrated in the blood of a daring TV journalist, Musa Khan Khel. It was a warning to the civil society of Pakistan — that did so much just a few months ago to overthrow the military ruler — that under Taliban rule no freedom of information would be tolerated.

We may recall that in the ’30s of the last century, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain surrendered to Hitler’s demands — first for Austria and then for Czechoslovakia — and assured the world that there would be peace.

Why protest the arrest of one editor if he has angered the Muslim orthodoxy? Why protect divorced Muslim women’s right for alimony as ordered by our top court if it angers the Muslim leaders?

Evidence strongly suggests that history is repeating itself because some leaders in our country, while competing for votebanks, are surrendering to illiberal Muslim leadership as an assertion of their peculiar brand of secularism.

Balbir K. Punj can be contacted at punjbk@gmail.com