Attack on a bus

We live in troubled times. Times when there is no sanctity for life and hatred hangs over the lives of virtually everyone in the country. We have seen a spate of sectarian killings in the last year. The new year starts with more. In an incident in Akhtarabad on the outskirts of Quetta, a car laden with explosives was slammed into a bus carrying Shia pilgrims who were returning from Iran. Three were killed while at least 31, including six policemen, were injured. It is telling that those moved to hospital then had to be shifted to safer medical centres to avoid a further attack on them. Inhumanity, it appears, has no limits.



The attack may have been retaliation for the events that took place in Rawalpindi on Ashura day. Such cycles of violence have been a part of our recent history. The question we need to ask ourselves is how to stop them. Hundreds have died in such attacks. Communities such as the Hazaras have been targeted with particular venom. Ending sectarianism is a task somewhat like removing poison from a vat of water into which it has been poured. The precise methods need to be scientifically and strategically thought out. As has been said many times before, security will not be enough to achieve this. Minds that have been brainwashed have to be changed.

This can be done only by beginning at several levels all at once. In schools, children need to be weaned away from the diet of hatred they have been fed. This is especially true at seminary schools which continue to crop up rapidly across the country. The media, too, must be used to re-educate people and promote the idea that divisions and violence on the basis of sect will destroy us as a nation. Perhaps, most crucially of all, mosque prayer leaders and clerics need to be brought into the wider game and the idea of cohesion preached by them. This, too, can have influence in a society that is in danger of falling completely apart and which needs to be glued back together piece by piece, no matter how difficult the task may be. We really have no other choice.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 3^rd, 2014.

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