Here We Go Again

Karachi shook again. But this was no minor shaking of the earth, which us Karachites have become so aware of after the recent earthquakes in Kashmir.

This time the shaking and the bleeding was about another common occurrence in this city. Bomb blasts. And no matter what the government says about the city “returning to normalcy,” Karachites are always waiting for that next big blast.

This time it blew up with a massive bang just outside the PIDC building, only a few yards away from the Sheraton Hotel, or rather, from the area where terrorists blasted a Pakistan Navy bus carrying French engineers only few years ago.

And only yesterday local news channels were highlighting President Musharraf’s confident claim that terrorism has been effectively curbed in the country. And how ironic it was that when I first heard the loud blast, I was skimming across Dawn’s front pages on which one of the news items was about Sindh Governor, Ishrat-ul-Ibad’s sweeping claim that how wonderfully Karachi has proven to the world what a safe city it really is.

Till this evening when I returned from a journalistic survey of the bomb site and then sat down to type my reports (this being one of them), no group or terrorist organization had owned the destruction that lay across the affected area in shape of charred cars, broken windows and splashes of human blood. So far two people had lost their lives and over a dozen were reported injured. The tragedy in this respect could have been a lot bleaker and bloodier had the blast taken place any time after 11: 00 am when the area (like most areas in Karachi), is choked with people and traffic.

And even though nobody has said anything yet as to who may be responsible, nobody will be surprised to figure out that it was one of the many jihadi organizations still active in the country.

The onlookers at the bomb blast site all thought so, and the police officials were slipping in more than the odd hint towards the usual conclusion.

But of course, at the Karachi Press Club, one couldn’t help but run into that ubiquitous group of journalists sympathetic to the Jamat-e-Islami ( now a traditional line of journalists who have been slipping into various sections of the country’s print and electronic media through liberal and progressive journalists’ wobbling legs, ever since the late ‘60s).

And how none of us jaded, “former Bolsheviks,” were surprised when once again we were passionately (and rather expertly), lambasted with theories about how the blasts were actually being engineered by the government to 1] show the Americans how much the government needs their backing and 2] to grab “innocent believers” and claim that they belonged to either Al-Queda or many of the banned jihadi organizations.

The logical thing to do in such hours of tragedy and tension is to slap such right-wing conspiracy theorists who have actually been trained right from the years when the Jamaat started its agitation against Z A. Bhutto’s democratic despotism, to turn the state’s opportunistic (but subtle) “Islam is in danger” rhetoric into a populist cry.

These blasts by the so-called heaven-bound jihadis have a lot to do with this chant that was first used by the original Muslim Leaguers to undermine Punjab’s support for the secular Union Party and NWFP’s support for Ghaffar Khan’s Khudai Khidmatkar shortly before partition in 1947.

And as the Pakistani state opportunistically used the “Islam is in danger” cry to keep at bay nationalist and leftist forces during the Cold War, this chant had turned into a well entrenched persecution complex across the common Pakistani populace by the time Bhutto was hanged by the Zia dictatorship in 1977.

And ironically, the political and psychological maneuvers of the country’s intelligence agencies, Army, politico-religious organizations (along with the American CIA), were such during the Afghan civil war, this complex was only heightened even when the Soviet forces were knocked out and over by 1988-89.

And of course, then came Kashmir. And by the late ‘90s, the state of Pakistan and its many puppet governments had constructed perhaps its most dangerous and bloodiest of Frankensteins.

They say modern states built over an ideology of religion can not escape the trappings of the persecution complex. A complex that begins as a cynical, psychological tool and lie, but ends up engulfing not only the common people as a truth, but even those men whose institutions were actually part of the complex’s initial, cynical utilization.

For example, if the early Muslim League leadership was merely using the power of the persecution complex to bag cheap votes and sympathy, many years later men like former ISI chief, General (Rt.) Hamid Gul quite seriously believe in what was once just exaggerated hogwash used by the mullahs and their sheepish, cynical love interests in the Army, the government and the State.

Today, most Pakistanis, educated and otherwise, may cringe with disgust when a jihadi fucker rips innocent people apart with a bomb in the name of Allah and Islam, but I have yet to see a lot of Pakistanis marching in protest against these terrible jihadi outfits, like they do, against, say, women marathon runners, or supposed Christian blasphemers?

And what a sight it was watching many of the most notorious jihadi outfits roaming the roads freely and openly, chanting loud naats and jihadi songs, as they went about asking for donations for the victims of the Kashmiri earthquakes. The irony of ironies.

Pakistanis stand most confused. More confused than ever. The persecution complex has become both a vicious trap and as well as a convenient justification. A trap that makes them feel guilty, isolated and torn from the insides, and a justification with which they can face this guilt and isolation without going crazy, or (god forbid(!)), actually end up thinking something like, hey, maybe, secularism may actually be our way out of this?

Lahaul-e-walakooat! It’s the persecution, idiot.