The news didn’t come as a surprise to me and I
am pretty sure, it wasn’t a surprise for many other like-minded people either.
Mumtaz Qadri, Salman Taseer’s assassin is in the process of becoming a saint. A
shrine is being built in Islamabad’s peripheries right under the nose of our
police and other law enforcement agencies. Soon, there will be an Urs every
year with hundreds and thousands of devotees pouring in from all over Pakistan,
similar to the day, when his funeral was held.
Incidentally, I was travelling to Punjab on the
day of his funeral. I was travelling on a local bus on the GT road. As soon as
the bus left the city limits, right before Dina, a group of young men with iron
rods and wooden canes forcibly stopped the bus and boarded it. They were more
or less ten men with emotions visible on their faces. Luckily for the bus and
its occupants, the conductor didn’t try to stop them, because they were not
only armed with iron rods but also with anger, which I believe is a lethal
combination. As soon as these guys boarded the bus, everyone had a fair idea,
who they were. These men had been to Mumtaz Qadri’s funeral and were returning
to their homes. Soon after, they started praising him, showing each other and
other travelers’ videos of the funeral and his last days in jail. They started
flaunting their religious fervor by saying that they haven’t slept for so
many hours only to attend the funeral and how difficult it was to reach the
inner circles, but they were lucky to have a last look at his face.
A number of people seem impressed, which I
believe is OK keeping in view the religiosity that exists in most of us.
However, the real twist in the story came when the conductor asked all of the
funeral attendees for fare. At first, the guys didn’t pay heed to the
conductor, but when he asked for the fare again, the angry young men, got
furious, about to beat the hell out of the conductor. However, some of the
sensible men managed to stop them. Yet, they refused to pay the conductor the
fare, saying they have just performed such a sacred mission and they don’t have
to pay anything and he shouldn’t have expected the fare from them. The
conductor tried again, but one of the guys called someone on his phone asking
the guy on the other side to come to the next bus stop with as many men as
possible to teach the conductor the lesson of his life. However, sense
prevailed and some of the people in the bus managed to cool them down. So these
guys traveled to Gujranwala from Islamabad free of cost, forcibly paying their
religious fervor as the bus fare.
The guys left, but it kept me thinking about
the kind of people and religiosity that has started to infect our society; I
apologize if I have hurt someone’s feelings by saying this, but I was disgusted
to my core that day. Again, on his Chehlum (40th day after death), another congregation of
similar people occupied Islamabad and the whole world saw their so called
leaders hurling the worst kind of abuses at the government and other leaders.
This is the most serious dilemma for our society, especially for those
responsible for maintaining law and order and when the National Action Plan in
being implemented in the country and the war against terror and extremism is
entering its final stages, at least as claimed by our government. If this is
all happening in Islamabad, then soon we will come across another story of a
murderer all set to become a saint.
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