via- The Baloch Hal During last year’s SAFMA [South Asian Free Media Association] conference, Imtiaz Alam, the organization’s secretary general, grumbled with the chief guest , the then president Asif Ali Zardari, about the government’s inaction against the Pakistani Taliban. Mr. Alam went on to warn the president that if Islamabad did not quash the Taliban, the people of Pakistan would cajole the United Nations to intervene in order to rescue the country from the cruelty of the Taliban. Zardari patiently listened to Mr. Alam’s complaint and also his naïve warning. But what the former president said in response merited significant attention. Zardari talked about the shortcomings within Pakistan’s liberal class. He explained how the right-wing was capable of bringing out tens of thousands of people on a short notice to rally for the causes they believe in. The former president taunted the liberal class for its lukewarm response to the assassination of former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer and its aftermath. Some people even did not show up for Taseer’s funeral, Zardari recalled, because they feared being targeted by fanatics like Mumtaz Qadri merely for attending the burial of a man who had unjustly been accused of blasphemy and murdered in broad daylight. Taseer’s murder sharply polarized the public opinion in Pakistan but it also provided the liberals an opportunity to stand up and vociferously denounce extremism. They missed that opportunity simply because it literally took them weeks to realize what they had actually witnessed under their nose: Pakistan had just entered a distressing epoch of extremism that had permeated even among the country’s clean-shaven, English-speaking professional lawyers and social media users. -Malik Siraj Akber
Posted on: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 09:18:36 +0000
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