By Kunwar Khuldune Shahid
Yesterday Pakistan announced the launch of a military operation in Punjab, the country’s most populous province. Once again it has taken unprecedented carnage for the state to do something. It took the massacre of schoolchildren in December 2014 for the government to announce a formal counter-terrorism policy. This time, a Taliban-orchestrated suicide attack in a children’s park in Punjab’s capital Lahore has jolted the state into action.
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Pakistani Taliban which has also pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State, has claimed responsibility for the bombing. The group’s spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told the media that Christians and Easter celebrations were the intended target of the attack, and that “it is a message to the Pakistani prime minister that we have arrived in Punjab.”
This is the second time in 13 months that Christians have been targeted in Lahore. In March last year twin bombings outside churches in Lahore killed at least 14 people in the city’s Youhanabad area – a Christian locality that falls within the constituency of the Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif.
As chaos erupted in Lahore yesterday, thousands of protestors clashed with the police in the capital, Islamabad. The rioters are supporters of Mumtaz Qadri, a police commando recently hanged for killing former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer for his opposition to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, and his defence of Asia Bibi a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy. The pro-Qadri rioters are still camped inside Islamabad’s “red zone, with a set of 10 demands, including official acknowledgement of Qadri as a “martyr”, immunity for those killing in the prophet Muhammad’s name and the execution of Asia Bibi.
Yesterday’s events have overlapped with Islamist parties uniting against the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)-led government’s progressive policy-making. Since the turn of the year, the government has unblocked YouTube, initiated a bill to criminalise child marriages, punished Qadri and passed an act to protect women from violence and harassment.
In November, prime minister Nawaz Sharif became the first Pakistani head of government to attend a Diwali event, where he presented himself as “everyone’s prime minister” and vowed to eradicate religious discrimination in front of the local Hindu community. In December, Punjab police were asked to remove hate literature against the Ahmadiyya minority from Lahore’s largest technology market. Earlier this month, the government passed a resolution to announce holidays for religious festivals of the minorities, including Holi, Diwali and Easter.
It is clear that targeting Christian children on Easter is a ploy to test the ruling party’s resolve. While bombing a park is another attack on a soft target, signifying the weakness of jihadist groups in Pakistan, the targeting of a Christian festival on the ruling party’s own ground has thrown down the gauntlet to Sharif.
Christians, like other religious minorities in Pakistan, including progressive Muslims, have been at the mercy of mob violence, owing to the Islam-specific clauses of Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which upholds the religious sentiments of Muslims over those of citizens of other beliefs, and sanctions the death penalty for “insulting Islam”.
While the state has taken notable steps towards religious moderation, it is obvious that sustained tolerance cannot be achieved without reforming the blasphemy law. And Qadri’s supporters, Islamist political parties and jihadist groups will throw everything they’ve got at the government to prevent that from happening.
The Jamaat-ul-Ahrar’s declaration of war against the ruling party shows that Punjab, and its capital, are the battlefields where the jihadists will bid to strangle the PML-N’s stronghold. This makes Christians in Lahore – the city’s largest religious minority – the most vulnerable targets for radical Islamists.
While the military operation announced this week is vital in the battle against jihadists in Punjab, it is victory in the ideological war that will ensure a tolerant and progressive Pakistan in the long run. How the government reacts to the rioters in Islamabad, and its verdict over the Asia Bibi case, could help determine Pakistan’s long-term future.
The events this week highlighted two groups – Muslims who want to celebrate Easter with Christians, and radical Islamists who want to suppress Easter festivity through violence and intimidation. It is the government’s stance that will dictate which side the silent majority support. And if recent events are anything to go by, there’s more than an inkling of hope that Pakistan will opt to be on the right side of history.
29 March 2016
http://www.theguardian.com/