140 dead and 538 injured – this little byline cuts through hearts and our future!
Yesterday was the day of images – moving pictures of excitement, energy, applause and then the saddest of recent tragedies. Innocent men and women charged with emotion and enthusiasm were blown away by suicide bombers, remote devices and alien belief systems. Or was it the case of wilful machinations and deceit. Only time will tell.
She had arrived much like the Greek characters – tearful, maligned, triumphant and a little pawn in the hands of gods. Amid the voices of criticism and hypocrisy that fail to note the complexity of our times, she emerged as a people’s woman – once again. Here were the loyalists dancing, singing and clapping – their queen, exiled and beaten had re-emerged.
They couldn’t care about the cost or the process. That was for the armchair classes of Pakistan to ponder about. The pull of Bhutto-name for the have-nots was once again re-established. So began a journey on the blood-lined roads of Karachi that have cracked with violence, blood and lawlessness. Yet they moved ahead oblivious of the fault lines that run from the drab, destroyed villages of Afghanistan to Karachi passing through a web of seminaries, officialdom and Lal Masjids of this world.
And so halfway, this peaceful journey – a testament of what the real Pakistan is all about – halted. And, something had erupted: imperial projects, state diktats and the crumbling centre. There was flesh, blood, fire and tears. And the wretched TV screens have documented all of this.
Devastating is one word that replaced amazing by the time we crossed the midnight in Pakistan! To quote Rumi here
A splinter is often
difficult to get out.
How much more difficult a thorn
in the heart! If everyone could find that thorn
in themselves, things would be
much more peaceful here!
There is a head now flashed on the screens – they can’t tell if it was a Jiyala or the suicide bomber. The TV channels are flashing bodies again and again – as before, discretion was thrown to winds and we have the singular honour of being a country where human limbs and guts of the dead are not just flashed but imposed on the senses until you are numb, exhausted and terrified. And, glorifying terror is the last thing we need.
Urooj Zia, a newspaper reporter was there:
“The bomb blasts happened while we were there. I was stunned, to say the least. There were people, bits of people, blood EVERYWHERE. An AryOne World cameraman lay there dying in front of us. We moved him to a police mobile, but he died in the hospital. I knew he would. I got his blood all over me — my hands, arms, clothes, shoes. Then there were charred bodies of policemen — smoke rising from them. Slippery blood everywhere….I went back to work after that, filed my story. Got home around 04:00 a.m., couldn’t sleep for two hours coz I couldn’t get the images out of my head. Puked a couple of times too.”
This tragedy is not just about who is responsible for this carnage. When humanity is in danger, we have to rise above our biases and loyalties and condemn what is WRONG. This is an issue that we all have to now live and deal with.
Our religion does not allow targeting women even in wartime and suicides are FORBIDDEN. Period. There is now a consensus at Al-Azhar and various other places of Islamic scholarship. If this is about Waziristan or the Lal Masjid then it should be fought elsewhere and not against the unarmed, dispossessed political workers.
All Pakistanis have to unite in condemning this barbarity. And all variants of Pakistaniat ought to be involved in this process – bickering at this stage will only make us question as to what message are we sending to the world, that we to quote Qandeel Shaam are “multiple little groups all bopping their heads against one another”?
Violence, militancy and suicide attacks are and will remain unacceptable. Legitimate politics must not give way to war-lord-ism! I end with Faiz:
abhii chiragh-e-sar-e-rah ko kuchh Khabar hii nahin
abhii garaani-e-shab mein kami nahin aaii
najaat-e-deeda-o-dil kii ghadi nahin aii
chale chalo key wo manzil abhii nahin aaii
the deadly and horrible incident of 18th October must be condemned and lets be realistic why blame bhutto that she was irresponsible
i think she was courageous when she decided to come back we cannot let the militants and agencies rule this country perpetually and its the bombers who will burn in the hell for killing innocent people
To blame Benazir for the incident falls in the category of “blaming the victim”. Are we now saying that if a popular leader should gather a large crowd in Pakistan and the nihilists and their manipulators bomb them, then it’s not the nihilists but the victims who are to blame? Whether Benazir was moving too slow or too fast is besides the point. She was back in her own country. Hundreds of thousands of people had come to welcome her…and this was no rent-a-crowd. Certainly, money must have been spent to bring them there, but their enthusiasm and love for the Bhutto name was obvious. People were dancing in the streets and music and songs were being played instead of bullets and bombs and its a terrible travesty to blame them or their leaders for this massacre.
The issue of security is not one of “foolproof” cordons and other such excuses. People forget that in a functional state, the major deterrent to such actions is the fact that no violent organizations can exist, plan and attack without exciting the interest of law-enforcement; if they do attack, they are vigorously pursued and dealt with and finally, they are not being supported and manipulated by elements of the state itself. In Pakistan, such organizations were encouraged and abetted by the “forward thinking” army. For the last 6 years, they have been officially banned, but no doubt has been left about the fact that this “ban” is ambiguous and loaded with exceptions and loopholes. Doubts about the sincerity of senior members of the intelligence agencies are widespread. In this atmosphere, attacks are easily assumed to have the blessings of one or the other faction in the power structure. There is little or no trust and little chance that the whole story will ever be known.
A good start would be to compare the situation in India. The various terrorist groups frequently articulate real grievances and have real support among some people. The intelligence agencies and security services in India are more unwieldy and decrepit than their Pakistani counterparts and are probably equally corrupt in terms of individual corruption. But there is no doubt about the state’s DESIRE to stop terrorists from various jihadi and separatist groups. That simple “unity of purpose” leads to the fact that a significant proportion of outrages is actually investigated and many perpetrators are actually caught. The system is very rickety, almost pre-industrial and highly inefficient and certainly cannot stop all outrages but it still delivers better results than the Pakistani system. In spite of years of terrorism and poor policing, politicians in India can still hold rallies and people can still gather in large numbers without “foolproof security”……Compare that to Pakistan, where the sitting government (in the form of Sheikh Rashid) is saying it probably cannot afford a true election campaign because large crowds are easy targets? (being a pessimist, I have to add that if things fall apart further in Pakistan, they will no doubt get worse in India as well, so I wouldn’t count my chickens yet if I were Indian).
Benazir is not the issue. The destruction of state authority and legitimacy and its replacement by a shadow military state which is not under the control of even its own chief is the real issue..
Dear Viqar: there are no defenders here, or at least I haven’t read any statement that defends the PPP leadership. They are like any other self-serving class in our country. By your account, they are responsible for this carnage and maybe this is the case. The sad reality is poor people have lost their lives and we are shocked at such death.
Grateful to Sidhas for posting this verse from the Quran:
“We ordained for the children of Israel that if anyone slew a person, unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land, it would be as if he slew the whole of mankind. And if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of a whole people. (al-Ma
MQ – Good one
Thanks to Adil we all are exchanging our views here in a civil manner. All other public blogs such as KMB are taken over by nuts.
I don’t even want to talk about Benazir, or Musharraf or any of the other leaders… this tragedy is a national catastrophe and its implications are just too huge to contemplate. People here are arguing whether Benazir should have flown in a helicopter or driven in a car or led the parade in a truck. The problem is not her choice of transport, but the increasing presence of suicide bomber squads, terrorists and assassins in our country. Dozens of incidents have occurred just in the last 4 months. Preventing people from collecting in large groups is impossible in our society. What will you do during Muharram? What will you do on Eid prayers? What will you do during Basant? There are bound to be large collections of people for long periods of time. Unless we decide to lock every one up in their homes…
The interior minister has stated that suicide bombers are unstoppable pretty much by any government in the world. And his comments are quite justified, because despite its technological superiority, the US has not been able to stop suicide attacks in either Afghanistan or Iraq… or on its own soil. They’ve happened in the UK as well and all the relevant intelligence services have claimed that another attack on UK/US soil is not a question of ‘if’, but ‘when’. And these, by the way, are countries where extremist populations are absolutely infinitesimal in contrast to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The suicide bomber is such a powerful and seemingly unstoppable weapon when it comes to disrupting society at every level, and those who seek to use it are so Satanic in their intent, that one is completely at a loss to understand if and when this will ever end. As a society, we continue to respect the mullah, a large part of the mullah brigade then raises brainwashed children in madrassahs, a segment of these children in turn get highly radicalised, a subset thereof get trained and armed and wait their turn to blow themselves up.
How do we stop this phenomenon at its roots without tearing our society apart? Without a solution to this problem, there can not be a bright future for us. And the reverse of the tipping point phenomenon will strike us… our progress in all areas will be curtailed just enough to keep us from ever “breaking out”, and by the time we look up and compare, we would have been left far behind. A non-entity.
I am utterly depressed and despondent today. I am convinced that a change of government will not help this situation. A change of policy will not help this situation either. The fanatics will find some other issue; women’s rights, music and CD bans, compulsory purdah or some other depraved agenda as a ruse to continue their mass-blackmail of our society and our people. I can only pray that God destroys these depraved fanatics, and subjects them to unending torture both on earth and in hell.