Pakistan’s status as a venue for international sports and Lahore’s reputation as the queen of the undivided, and later partitioned, Punjab was severely marred after extremists attacked the bus carrying Sri Lankan cricketers to the Gaddafi stadium on March 3, 2009.
Five Sri Lankan cricketers were injured in the attack. Six securitymen and two civilians were also killed. The Lahore Test was called off and the tour cancelled.
The Sri Lankan players were evacuated from the Gaddafi stadium and taken to a nearby airbase. The team, including two seriously injured players, flew out in a chartered plane around 10 pm the same day. While there had been terror strikes on the sidelines of cricket, this was the first time players were directly targeted in Pakistan and the second time in the world — the first being 11 Israeli athletes killed by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics. International Cricket Council president David Morgan described Pakistan as “a very dangerous place” and speaking about the World Cup, he said: “Things will have to change dramatically in Pakistan in my opinion if any of the games are to be staged there.”
This book highlights how the people involved in the war in the name of religion and using terrorism as their weapon have spread out of Punjab and are adding fuel to fire of Pakistan’s intra state conflicts. The most important part of the book talks about the relationship between the South Punjab and the rise of the Sipah-e-Sahaba and people associated with it, that are fighting against India. The factors which Mujahid Hussain observes are against the Pakistani’s purpose to fight terrorism are within the state itself. “Pakistan is an Islamic state in making” and the militants believe that the states policies are inefficient to implement true Islamic system (sharia) in the country.
Khaled Ahmed, director, South Asia Free Media Association, Lahore, who has written the foreword for this book, wrote in the Express Tribune of February 19, 2012, that he was surprised a fortnight ago to receive a note from Lahore’s General Post Offi-ce saying he had imported a banned book which the Post Office had duly confiscated. The book in question was Punjabi Taliban by Mujahid Hussain which is available in Pakistan too and advertised by a Kara-chi bookseller on the Internet.
Terrorists are angry at the book. The Punjab government has now joined them.
Some years ago, Punjab law minister Rana Sanaullah denied that south Punjab was a haven of the Punjabi Taliban. Ex-editor Shireen Mazari who belongs to DG Khan in south Punjab wrote in the News (April 29, 2009) “Why military action is not the answer” about the dominance of jihadi madrasas in DG Khan. He pointed to the “foreign funding” they were receiving: “In DG Khan, there are 185 registered madrasas of which 90 are Deobandi (with a total of 324 teachers), 84 are Barelvi (with a total of 212 teachers), six are Ahle Hadith (107 teachers) and five are Fiqh-e-Jafaria (10 teachers)”.
She continued: “Of the Deobandi madrasas, Jamia Ataul-Ulum, with 200 boarders and 20 day-students ranging from 5-25 years, and eight teachers, receive donations from Kuwait. Jamia Darul Rehmania offers education up to Class 8 and has 350 boarders plus 230 day-students and 28 teachers. The total number of Deobandi madrasa students in the DG Khan district is 11,535. Interestingly, in this category, it is the large madrasas linked to the JUI that receive foreign funding almost solely from Kuwait.”
The next major blow to Pakistani Punjab’s Lahore, which confirmed Mujahid Hussain’s observations in his latest book Punjabi Taliban, was the bloody assassination of governor Salmaan Taseer in January 2011. It is relevant to mention the titles of the 11 chapters of this book, through which Mr Hussain brings out what he refers to as the heart-breaking change in Punjab — from deep-rooted secular cultural traditions to an environment of extremism, intolerance and hatred. Lamenting that the Punjab presented in the classic Punjabi movies does not exist anymore, where the sounds of music got drowned by the staccato of bullets and loudspeakers in mosques and madrasas, which were constructed at a very rapid pace, Hussain mentions developments marking the turning point.
While the coup against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, revolution in Iran and the third tin-pot dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq’s policies as major factors impacting all of Pakistan, the damage done to Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, he feels is more tragic and quite visible.
Anil Bhat, a retired Army officer, is a defence and security analyst based in New Delhi