Pakistan remains in a muddled fix

Data's Lahore and Jinnah's Pakistan remain in a muddled fix

The shrine culture is despised by many puritan Muslims who equate it with idol-worship and thus against the teachings of Islam. However, there's a vast shrine-going majority; the number of such puritans is no more than 10 per cent, which is still alarming. The Deobandi and Wahhabi creed has registered a whopping increase since the Afghan jihad days when Gen Zia-ul Haq allowed petro-dollars from the Gulf sheikhdoms to come in to help set up puritan seminaries, whose number is now in thousands.

The Taliban and militants of their ilk have all come out from such seminaries; most still receive grants from the government as a hangover of the Zia dictatorship, and no government has dared to cut off the official monthly payouts they get. It is a measure of government's inability to rein in extremism that the Lal Masjid prayer leader in Islamabad, who raised a rebellion against Musharraf and necessitated a military action killing over a hundred people in 2007, is back in his sarkari job.

The vast majority of Pakistanis remain practitioners of the Barelvi creed, who are shrine-going, peaceful people. But the same cannot be said of those sitting in the bureaucracy and in the government. Punjab's law minister Rana Sanaullah is accused of having links with banned militant organisations; the Sharif brothers who hold sway in the province would find it very awkward to relieve him of his job, not least because they wouldn't want to rub their erstwhile Saudi benefactors the wrong way.

Meanwhile, Data's Lahore and Jinnah's Pakistan remain in a muddled fix, created by military dictators and tolerated by the democratic leaders of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. -- Murtaza Razvi

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