The police and Rangers didn’t offer any resistance and permitted the mob to reach D-Chowk
JUBAIL, SAUDI ARABIA: One may question why Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif himself would oversee the inquiry to determine how a violent mob entered Islamabad despite a strong presence of around 4,000 police and Rangers personnel. Apparently, he does not seem content with the inquiry being conducted by the Islamabad administration and the interior ministry. This is a valid question every sensible man and woman in Pakistan is asking — why is the Intelligence Bureau and other agency reports were ignored wherein the government was warned of exactly what happened in Islamabad at the time of religious activists’ sit-in? The police and Rangers didn’t offer any resistance and permitted the mob to reach D-Chowk while destroying, enroute, whatever was in its way. The so-called containers placed to stop the mob were empty — easily put aside by protestors. There was no need for a crane as used earlier during the Imran Khan-Tahirul Qadri sit-in.
Things are crystal clear: we are fighting a half-hearted war against terrorism wherein an influential part of our society — law-enforcement agencies, the bureaucracy, politicians, clergy, media, educationists, students and businessmen — is siding with the religious extremists of their respective sects. Even after losing more than 60,000 precious lives, we are building our narrative on half-truths, in which case no one can help us.
The National Action Plan (NAP) introduced new vocabulary, now being widely used — for example, “sahulatkar”, the facilitators of terrorists. After what happened in Lahore on March 27 — in which, allegedly, a madarassa teacher belonging to a certain sect blew himself up to kill and maim countless people, including toddlers, while on the same day, another sectarian group was permitted to lay a siege to the country’s capital — we don’t need to make much effort to look for “sahulatkars” — they are all around us. In fact, we have moved to the next stage — who is not a saholatkar?
Masood Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, April 1st, 2016.
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