And I am not a terroristIJ
The sheer effrontery of the Mumbai attacks mastermind Hafiz Saeed, founder of lashkar-e-Taiba (leT) and chief of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) in moving the United Nations asking he be removed from the list of designated terrorists is breath taking. But the more important question is: How does he get the gall to make such a representation, and from where does the support for this kind of Islamic terrorism come fromIJ The answers lie in a failed state called the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and its increasingly radicalised society that traces its nationhood to a combination of a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy, a highly militarized social structure and a post-colonial elite that thought it could use the religion of Islam in a utilitarian manner which included delegating the social-cultural space nearly in its entirety to misogynist mullahs to build a modern nation-state with Muslim characteristics, as it were, a la Deng Xiaoping with his 'Communism with Chinese characteristics' model.
The utter failure of this project is evident. The danger for India, which is what concerns us here, is that the learnings from this developing disaster in our neighbourhood seem not to have been comprehended fully.
It will help to focus the mind to look at the events that have gone down in Pakistan over the past week. It may even help understand why the Butcher of Bombay's petition against the United Nations Security Council's decision of December 2008, filed incidentally through one of Pakistan's leading law firms based in lahore, is par for the course: A mob of Sunni Barelvi activists blocked the vital Islamabad-Rawalpindi highway flyover for days on end demanding the resignation of the Pakistan law minister for daring to, in their view, dilute the vicious anti-Ahmadi provisions in the country's election laws and change a couple of words in the oath taken by elected legislators which, again from their perspective, undermined the "finality" of Prophet Mohammad.
The result: An army brokered solution, no less, which resulted in the resignation of law minister Zahid Hamid, the withdrawal of both "contentious" changes, the inclusion of mullahs from the Islamist organisations spearheading the agitation on a panel to decide changes in school text books and assurances from Government that Pakistan's notorious blasphemy laws will not be diluted, nobody would face difficulties in registering cases of blasphemy and no leniency would be shown to those convicted for blasphemy. For good measure, it was also clarified by the authorities there will be no ban on loudspeakers.
This, then, is the eco-system in which Hafiz Saeed thrives. And neither a well-past its sell-by date UN nor a US administration regardless of political hue will be able to do much about it. It is up to India to eliminate the cancer of Islamic terrorism from her neighbourhood.
