Violence in Pakistan
Sectarian violence is again on the rise in Pakistan. Twenty-four Shi'ite Muslims were killed on Monday while praying in a cemetery. A Sunni hard-line group has reportedly owned the responsibility of this carnage. This pogrom has stoked the fire of religious intolerance in Pakistan - a curse that has come to plague this country since its birth - that was probably smouldering for a while. Shiites, a minority among the majority Muslims in Pakistan have vowed to hit back raising the possibilities of more and widespread violence there.
It is a pity that a country so professedly Islamic as Pakistan has come to nurture something that has not the slightest of sanction in the tenets of Islam. One reason that no initiative to resolve this meaningless fratricidal and inhuman culture of conflict followed from the powers that be is the greed and myopia of political leaders who tried to fish in the troubled water. There has never been any serious effort to extirpate the factors that are usually at work behind sectarian violence. Former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto did zealotry and violence a world of favour when he buckled under majority Sunnis' demand for declaring Qadiyanis as non-Muslims. Political convenience assumed so much importance that it did not matter if the decision rendered a personality like Nobel prize winning physicist Abdus Salam homeless.
We lend our moral support behind Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's democratically elected government in the hope that it will help Pakistan wake up from the nightmares of history and be cured of this legacy of blood. There is a palpable lesson for us in all this sectarian violence in Pakistan. Because short term benefits through liaison with fascistic and intolerant forces seem to be catching the imagination of a section our leaders increasingly.
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