Khaled Ahmeds A n a l y s i s
General Pervez Musharraf brought Pakistan out of its Dark Age of death and destruction by rolling back Pakistans 20 year old jihad. He banned the jihadi organisations - once nurtured carefully by the ISI - to win back space for Pakistan in the international polity. But there was a measure of ambiguity in his approach that made many think that he could be merely hiding jihad under the bushel for the time being, to be brought out to threaten the world once again. The time probably has come to threaten the world a la? General Hameed Gul, Pakistans de facto ruling strategist, who is once again parading his trigger-happy vision on the TV channels.
In its May 2006 issue monthly Herald published a report by Azmat Abbas that the government had allowed Sipah Sahaba to reinstate itself on the condition that it would no longer indulge in militancy (sic!), violence of the verbal or active sort. The Sipah, now renamed Millat-e-Islamia Pakistan (MIP), held its first post-ban meeting in Islamabad on 6 April 2006 under the surveillance of the agencies. This rally was the outcome of an understanding reached between Sipah and the government in March 2006. But when the party convened with a gathering of 5,000 people it became a show of strength of the old sectarian terrorist Sipah. The government allowed Brigadier (Retd) Zaheerul Islam Abbasi the officer who failed narrowly to stage a military-religious coup in 1995 but is now running his own extremist organisation to harangue the gathering.
Sipah Sahaba rides again? The meeting chanted anti-Shia slogans and vowed to avenge the deaths of their leaders Haq Nawaz Jhangvi and Maulana Azam Tariq at the hands of the Shia. Literature of anti-Shia exhortation was distributed as well as videos depicting beheadings of American soldiers in Iraq. MIP leader Dr Khadim Hussain Dhillon said his party had held its gathering with the governments permission after he had protested the governments according of normal protocol to Allama Sajid Naqvi the leader of the banned Tehrik Jafaria while Naqvi was a member of the MMA.
The intelligence officers looking after the Sipah told Herald that the gathering was the outcome of a long drawn out process of negotiation with the banned organisation. This also involved a reconciliation between the Sipah and the Shia organisation. Arrested leaders, like the fanatically anti-Shia Maulana Muhammad Ludhianvi, were to be released and in return the rabid Shia leader of Sipah Muhammad, Allama Ghulam Raza Naqvi would be released and sent to Gilgit where he would head a seminary. The Shia of Gilgit were making preparation to celebrate his entry there. The government went ahead and further made peace with the anti-Shia activists, members of the dreaded Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. (Rustam Khan Muawiya, Asghar Muawiya and Ghulam Farid were let off at the Sindh High court. Member of MMA, Shia leader Allama Hassan Turabi was attacked in Karachi the very next day in which he narrowly escaped death. He issued a statement connecting the attack with the release of the Lashkar members.)
Lashkar-e-Tayba revived? Earlier on 2 May 2006, the State Department in Washington named Pakistans Jamaat al-Dawa and its affiliated Idara Khidmat-e-Khalq as terrorist organisations that pose a threat to the United States. Everybody knew that Jamaat al-Dawa was earlier the dreaded Lashkar-e-Tayba banned by a UN Committee as a terrorist organisation. The Idara Khidmat-e-Khalq had been active in the relief and reconstruction work in the Azad Kashmir areas affected by the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. It now developed that the Idara could not be used to rescue the bad image the Jamaat al-Dawa had garnered for itself over the recent years. Its leader Hafiz Said had constantly condemned the policies of the government in general and President Musharraf in particular, and had used all kinds of dire threats.
For some puzzling reason, President Musharraf has been soft on Jamaat al-Dawa. Some say because the son of an important personality in Islamabad is a member of the outfit, but why allow its firebrand leader Hafiz Said to constantly badmouth him? All the other dreaded jihadi outfits banned either by the UN or put on the terrorist list the United States have duly changed their names and are operating quietly without shooting off their mouths. At one point this year President Musharraf actually called in all the police chiefs of the country and asked them to catch hold of the old jihadi outfits on the UN terrorist list now operating under changed names; but nothing happened. The attitude of the president has been most puzzling, especially after the fact that he had nearly gotten himself killed at the hands of the fanatic activists of these very jihadi militias.
Lashkar/Dawa becomes popular? Then Islamabad literally issued an edict defying the Washington categorisation of Jamaat al-Dawa. The Foreign Office was made to say that Pakistan had no plans to act against the two Islamic charities listed by the United States last week as terrorist organisations. Its stance was however correct. We are not required, and we do not put any entities on the terrorist lists, if action is taken under the domestic US law, it said, However, if the UN Security Councils sanctions committee were to designate any organisation (as a terrorist group), then it becomes a legal obligation to take action.
The Foreign Office statement was followed on 6 May 2006 by demonstrations in which hundreds of residents demonstrated against the US in Garhi Habibullah and Balakot, NWFP, where the banned organisations are still running tent villages and hospitals for locals where 90 percent of the non-government organisations (NGOs) are wrapping up their camps after finishing relief projects. The press noted that Jamaat al Dawa had become popular in the earthquake-hit region and its activists had become heroic icons for the local population. The Jamaat al-Dawa was even more popular in Azad Kashmir where its relief work was much aided by the fact that it had been active there as a jihadi militia under the tutelage of the ISI. As reported in Dawn , on 10 May 2006, hundreds of people staged a rally in Muzaffarabad, Azad Kashmir, to condemn the United States ban on the Jamaat al-Dawa: Down with America, down with Bush, the demonstrators shouted. According to daily Jang (29 May 2006) a sessions judge in Peshawar, after hearing the famous Al Qaeda and Sipah Sahaba lawyer Javed Ibrahim Paracha, ordered that a group of Egyptian mujahideen languishing in jail, be released, be treated at Al Khidmat Hospital, and then handed over to Mr Paracha pending their deportation to Egypt.
Christians and Hindus love Lashkar/Dawa? Then on 17 May 2006, more than one hundred Hindus and Christians from different parts of Sindh staged a demonstration in front of the press clubs of Hyderabad and Karachi against the United States recent move to include the Jamaat al-Dawa on its list of terrorist organisations. The next day however the Christians in Punjab rebelled against the orchestrated pro-Dawa protest. A leading Christian organisation in Punjab, National Commission of Justice and Peace (NCJP), condemned the pro-Jamaat al-Dawa rallies by Christians and Hindus in Sindh, particularly haris of Thar, saying that it was an establishment-sponsored ploy to glorify the jihadi militia. The statement was bold because it was made in the city where Jamaat al-Dawa is headquartered.
If there was an effort afoot to return to the jihadi option through the reinstatement of Sipah Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, it was already greatly undermined by the Nishtar Park massacre of the Barelvis on 11 April 2006. It soon became apparent that it was not a Shia-Sunni sectarian incident but a Sunni-Sunni one. As put in Urdu, it was not an act of terrorism based on fiqh but on maslak , and this is how it began to be described on the TV channels. Monthly Urdu journal Naya Zamana in its issue of May 2006, wrote that during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia had funded a number of organisations to carry out its Wahhabi project in the region, and one of these organisations was Lashkar-e-Tayba, then headquartered in Muridke Lahore, as Markaz Dawat wal Irshad. The project was of spreading pure Islam not only in Afghanistan but in Pakistan too as a bulwark against the emergence of a Shia state in Iran. The intent of Imam Khomeini to export the Shia revolution to the rest of the Islamic world was in parallel to the Saudi ambition of spreading the Wahhabi model.
After Shia-Sunni terror, it is Sunni-Sunni terror: According to Naya Zamana , the publications of Jamaat al-Dawa/Lashkar-e-Tayba and Sipah Sahaba (Khilafat-e-Rashida) criticised and condemned the Shias together with the Barelvis. The Barelvis were dubbed a moderate version of Shiism and both were together dubbed a version of Judaism. After General Zia, this Wahhabi Islam was used in Kashmir too and the state itself became more and permeated with this hardline faith. It was in the face of this Wahhabi dominance that Sunni Tehreek was defensively created to protect the interests of the Barelvis with force. As observed by Naya Zamana , when JUP chief Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani attended a rare gathering of the Barelvis in Lahore in those days he made a speech in which he declared that there were one lakh kalashnikovs in the Muridke headquarters of Lashkar-e-Tayba which will not be used in Kashmir but against the Barelvis in Pakistan.
Wahhabism and Deobandism are characterised by an opposition to popular culture and it literary and festive forms and is finally also opposed to democracy in favour of khilafat. They are hostile to the mystical batinya traditions of Waris Shah, Shah Husain, Mian Mir, Data Sahib, Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, Hazrat Zakariya Multani, etc. Wahhabism easily apostatises those that don not follow its strict order; and after someone is declared outside the pale of Islam his property is thought to be rightfully owned by the Wahhabis through looting and confiscation. It is on this principle that Barelvi mosques were taken from them. In the case of Jamaat Dawa or Lashkar-e-Tayba, this extended to taking Barelvi girls into forcible marriage after abduction and the looting of banks in the tradition of an early Companion, Abu Jandal, who funded jihad in this fashion. (After Hafiz Saids faction fell foul of the Ahle Hadith party of Prof Sajid Mir, one Qari Hanif issued a series of audio tapes in which he accused Hafiz Said chief of Jamaat al-Dawa of looting banks in Gujranwala and abducting Barelvi girls.)
Viability of jihad option: President Musharrafs attitude towards Jamaat al-Dawa has puzzled almost everyone who has watched Pakistan. Now some critics connect it to the on-going peace process with India where he expects India to match Pakistans flexibility on Kashmir: If India fails to deliver, Pakistan will take out the Lashkar-e-Tayba card and start playing it again . This option becomes pointed because Hafiz Said is a wanted man in India. According to Frontline (5 Nov 2005) on December 22, 2000, Lashkar-e-Tayba (LeT) claimed responsibility for the Red Fort attack in which three Army personnel lost their lives. The main accused in the case, Mohammed Arif alias Ashfaq, a Pakistani national and a member of the LeT, used his mobile phone to convey to BBC correspondents in New Delhi and Srinagar his organisations responsibility immediately after the shootout. This, apart from the other pieces of evidence pointing to the LeTs involvement in the attack, was the basis of the trial courts conclusion that the LeT planned and carried out the assault.
The truth is that jihad is no longer an option. It is not an option even if only for brandishing under the nose of the world community. It gains nothing for Pakistan in regard to the Kashmir dispute; but it will certainly force the countrys civil society into making another painful shift to adjust to Hafiz Saids parallel government. Even if the fiat has come from Saudi Arabia, it is not in the best interest of Pakistan. |
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