Blast at Jhule Lal shrine

The countryside of Sindh has its own problems of repressive feudalism and rapacious dacoits but terrorism is not one of them. Militants sworn to the intolerant Takfiri creed had spared Sindh from the brutal and almost-daily assault on the lives of civilians elsewhere. It is also to the credit of its people that they did not lend themselves to the dubious temptations of this ideology that seeks to homogenise society by eliminating every Sufi, Shia and Ahmediya Muslim. The suicide bombing of the shrine of the 12th century Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar or Jhule Lal was part of a pattern that has reasserted itself after being beaten back by the Pakistan army’s Operation Zarb-e-Azb.  There have been six back-to-back attacks this week in different parts of Pakistan that have claimed over 200 lives.

It is a sad commentary on the reflexes of the Pakistani state that it took an incident like this to swing into action. Within 24 hours, various arms of the Pakistani state claim to have gunned down nearly 40 militants in locations as diverse as Karachi, Orakzai, Bannu, Dera Ismail Khan and Sargodha. Assuming that all those killed had their hands dipped in the blood, did the authorities have to wait for the tragic assault on a tolerant, mystical practice of Islam? The question is especially pertinent because military and civilian leaders alike had been crowing that Zarb-e-Azb had broken the back of militancy.

The immediate closure of the Torkham border with Afghanistan suggests that the blame game on ‘hostile foreign powers’ may have begun. But the core problem was and remains with the Pakistan state’s tolerance towards extremist groups that back its policy towards India and Afghanistan. The people are bound to give a befitting reply to the assault on the unique Indo-Islamic brand of spiritualism by continuing to turn up in large numbers at the shrine. Long after the Wahabis and their minders are gone, Jhule Lal will continue to provide spiritual sustenance to millions. But the Pakistani state needs to make a beginning by repairing its relations with neighbours and admitting that this is primarily a home-grown problem.