The Lashkar ascendancy and Indo-Pak relations

Bibhu Prasad Routray

New Indian Express, 6 January 2013

In the first week of December 2012, Lahore’s National Arts College shut down its academic journal, pulled all of the journal’s back issues from the shelves of the bookstores and dissolved its editorial board. The Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture had published pictures of a series of paintings by artist Muhammad Ali, some of which allegedly depicted Muslim clerics in scenes with sexual overtones. The action of the college authorities followed the demands of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), the front organisation of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), which had issued a statement demanding the college issue a public apology and withdraw all issues of the journal. As the year 2012 drew to a close, the influence of these fanatic Islamists on Pakistani society and government appeared to be at its peak. This truth should form the backdrop of India’s understanding why Pakistan would never act on the perpetrators behind the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks.

(The picture used on top of the article is a painting by artist Muhammad Ali)  

Among Muhammad Ali’s paintings were a group of women approaching a mosque, a cleric and a shirtless young boy, and a naked young boy sitting at the feet of a cleric. In a press conference in Lahore, JuD spokesperson said that these paintings are part of Western and American plans to malign Islam. Following a few threatening text messages, the college capitulated.

In recent months, the LeT/JuD has imposed a range of diktats on the lives of urban Pakistanis, demonstrating the ascendancy of fanaticism which was mostly described to be a ‘it happens there, not here’ thing till late. Interventions by Islamists are regularly made to stop singing and dancing in marriage parties. Even a five-star hotel in tourist resort Bhurban, barely an hour’s drive from capital Islamabad, was forced to call off a musical concert after Islamists interpreted the move as anti-Islam.

In 2010, the decision of the Punjab government in Pakistan to hand over Rs 82 million to JuD led to raised eyebrows all over the world. It can be safely argued that during the current civilian government’s tenure, the LeT’s project reinforcement appears to have been successfully completed. Its diktats are now being routinely supported not just by official decisions but also by judicial decrees.

Even after the Lahore National Arts College pulled down its journal, and made the department members resign before shutting down the department altogether, the artist and board members are being tried for blasphemy. In other instances of state surrender to the Islamists, the government has banned the inexpensive late-night call schemes offered by mobile phone companies arguing that these promote immorality. Even the Supreme Court, which is at loggerheads with the government on the corruption issue, has meekly capitulated. Following a petition by the Islamists, it has ordered the country’s media regulatory body to look into blocking “vulgar” and “obscene” content on television.

On the contrary, no pressure whatsoever appears to be on the LeT/JuD, which this year proposes to launch a mobile app containing a host of online games to make the “players better human beings”. Such extensive and unhindered online presence points to an uncomfortable truth. The outfit’s strategic importance to Pakistan’s skewed existence has grown to a point of no return. Pakistan is out to cleanse itself of the remaining traces of sanity, modernity and secularism it is left with.

In this backdrop, the December 19 call of the US State Department, arguably the first public statement of this nature, that Pakistan dismantles the LeT is unlikely to be heeded by the civilian establishment. Pakistan acceding ever to New Delhi’s requests to take the LeT leadership and their ISI cohorts for the Mumbai attacks to task is a much distant call.

Pakistan Home Minister Rehman Malik’s December 2012 tour to India would be more remembered for his series of outrageous utterances than anything else. Incidentally, his absurd statements did not stop with the end of his Indian tour. As soon as he landed back in Pakistan on December 16, Malik boasted that he raised the issue of Indian interference in Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Coincidentally, only three days earlier, on December 13, JuD chief Hafiz Saeed had declared during a Lahore press conference, “Mark my words, India was behind all the unrest in Balochistan and Karachi.”

New Delhi has several options to bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack to task. However, till it gathers courage to pursue such a course of action, the least it can do is to stop pretending that everything will ever be normal with Pakistan. The ascendancy of fanaticism is an ill Pakistanis themselves will have to resolve.

http://newindianexpress.com/magazine/voices/article1407276.ece

Republished in Eurasia Review