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print versionGod’s thugs
Religious vigilante groups intent on rooting out ’vulgarity’ are causing fear among Lahore’s traders
First, they went after the barber shops and video stores, razing to the ground those outlets they deemed inimical to their obscurantist interests.
Then came the girls’ schools: well over 50 in the past year alone, further hampering the cause of women’s rights (not to mention literacy) in an already avowedly patriarchal society. In the Taliban’s ongoing battle against primary education, four girls in a schoolbus killed by a roadside bomb in Upper Dir became the latest casualties last Wednesday.
These episodes began to emerge in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province in 2003, when the Taliban were able to regroup from their defeat at the hands of American forces in Afghanistan, and picked up in earnest in late 2006 with the emergence of organised Pakistani Taliban.
The phenomenon of moral policing by seemingly unconnected groups of religious extremists is also spreading – albeit intermittently - to Pakistan’s metropolitan cities.
In Lahore last week, a series of three bombs devastated a juice corner-cum-dating spot in the heart of the city, injuring six and killing one elderly man who succumbed to his wounds in hospital.
Traders in the middle-class Gari Shahu neighbourhood later reported to police they had been approached by "religious-minded" people who visited their shops and advised them against allowing unmarried couples to frequent the juice market – made all the more "infamous" by its private cabins and luxurious settees. Not heeding the warnings, they were forced to pay the ultimate price. A group calling themselves Tehreek-e-Haya ("Movement for Dignity") later claimed responsibility.
And over the weekend, video store owners on Hall Road in Lahore were sent threatening letters and phone calls by more unknown parties informing them to "clean up their act" by October 20 or face serious consequences. Unlike the juice store owners, they took the warning seriously and responded by holding a bonfire of blue movies.
All around town, moves are being made by cafe owners to close early to avoid similar warnings. Franchise owners of Subway, KFC and McDonald’s, meanwhile, are placing notices on their stores carrying messages like "This store is owned and operated by a Pakistani national".
Not since the run-up to the infamous raid on the Lal Masjid (the Red Mosque) in Islamabad last summer, when "chicks in sticks" would roam the streets of the capital looking to throw hot ash on unveiled women, and later go on to kidnap the alleged madam of a brothel, have such acts in the name of virtue been imposed so brazenly upon urban Pakistanis. (The ruling secular party in Karachi was also told by the Pakistani Taliban to step down in August, though its stronghold over the city for the time being is more or less assured.)
Now, as then, there is no shortage of apologists: blogger Amna Gillani, for example, described the "low intensity" of the Lahore blasts, while emphasising the "notoriety" of the juice shops and concluded: "This must be [a] warning".
Even Imran Khan, that darling of the west, noted on Cif the threat posed by what he terms "pseudo-westernisation" that permits fundamentalists to rally against "western vulgarity". He went on draw comparisons between Pakistan today and Iran in 1979 – ripe for revolution.
Conservatives like Gillani and Khan may have their own interests to promote but in reality a mass uprising against "vulgarity" isn’t likely. Rather, the large-scale destruction of girls’ schools and the creation of what the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan calls "rights-free zones" in the North-West Frontier Province may, in the words of a prescient editorial written some months back in Dawn, "give ordinary lawbreakers a chance to vent personal or ideological grievances by taking cover behind the march of religious militancy".
