Could Musharraf�s Ordeal Spill over to India?

[Dilip/Dil Deka]

  If you missed this article by Tavleen Singh, read it. She has been successful in connecting the Lal Masjid incident to what could happen in India.
  Dilip
  ======================================================
  Published in the Sentinel: 
   
  Musharraf’s Ordeal
ON THE SPOT
Tavleen Singh
The trouble with what happened in Islamabad last week is that nobody is completely sure if it was what it seemed to be. On the face of it the Lal Masjid violence appeared to be a jehadi revolt within the jehad that Pakistan has for decades nurtured as a pillar of its foreign policy. The images were scary. The masked students with their ultra-medieval clothes and ultra-modern machine guns attacking Pakistani security personnel and the women who followed in their wake in black burqas marching like an army of plump, screeching crows. Then there were the cries for ‘jehad’ and the firing and the people who died, and all of this in the heart of Pakistan’s capital, minutes away from the General’s seat of power and right in the middle of Islamabad’s genteel residential localities where well-heeled Pakistanis and diplomats live the good life in big bungalows with big gardens. I was riveted. What on earth was this? Could it really be that General Musharraf’s holy warriors were
 turning on him? Was that possible? 
What happens now and what are the consequences for our beloved Bharat Mata populated as she is with a larger Muslim population than Pakistan or Bangladesh? Visas to our friendly, neighbourhood Islamic republic remain hard to come by — impossible in my case — so I resorted to the usual practice of making a few calls to well-informed friends in Pakistan. I got two contrary views. 
None of the people I know are particularly fond of military rule but there are those who believe that it is better than Talibanization and this lot saw the attack from the Lal Masjid as genuine. Only General Musharraf can control these people, they said, so even if this means putting up with a longer spell of military rule it is better than having the Islamists take charge. If it means that the General resists pressure to take his uniform off and behave like an ordinary politicians, they said, then let him keep his uniform on but get rid of the jehadis.
My friends in the other camp take the opposite view. They believe that the Lal Masjid episode was stage managed by the General and his cohorts to show the world — and especially the Americans — what could happen if the moderate, modern presence of General Musharraf is removed from the scene. They believe that if Pakistan is today considered jehad central by commentators across the globe, then it is largely due to the policies that General Musharraf has followed since he seized power in that military coup in 1999. It is important to remember that when he did, he was welcomed by most Pakistanis as a saviour even if we in India disliked him from day one because we saw him as the architect of the Kargil war and the leading financier of the ‘freedom movement’ in Kashmir.
General Musharraf’s image in international circles grew after 9/11 when he abandoned his support of the Taliban in Afghanistan and eased off his support to the Kashmir jehad to become a leading ally in President Bush’s global war on terrorism. He was received with warmth and friendship in Western capitals despite nearly every major terrorist act having in it a Pakistani component. But this year has not been a good one for him. When he sacked the Chief Justice in the arbitrary style that dictators favour, he could not have dreamt that there would be a countrywide revolt against him. When he allegedly used the MQM (Mohajir Quami Movement) to fight the protesters in Karachi, he could not have expected the violent outcome. 
Everything has gone wrong since with even his American friends wavering in their support. A few months ago there were rumours that the Americans were persuading him to come to an arrangement with Benazir Bhutto to bring a semblance of real democracy to Pakistan. Some of my friends believe that the Lal Masjid revolt was a sideshow for their benefit. In the words of a reliable Pakistani friend, ‘‘He is trying to show them what could happen if he was not around any more and not around in uniform.’’
>From an Indian perspective, let me say that the images from Lal Masjid sent a chill down my atheistic spine. Having been to Deoband’s famed Dar-ul-Uloom from whom the Taliban learned their unpleasant version of Islam and having seen on my travels across the country formerly normal Muslims turning fundamentalist, I worry about what could happen here. How long is it before we get copycat Lal Masjid revolts in India? In last July’s terrorist attack on Mumbai’s commuter trains, we saw that it was the work of indigenous jehadis and this pattern is now being discerned in other acts of terrorism as well. No longer can we blame the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) for every bomb that goes off on Indian soil. We know that Indian Muslims are increasingly being seduced by the worldwide jehad and we saw that some doctors involved in the attempt to bomb London and Glasgow were Indian. One’s family in Bangalore protested his innocence and said he was being targeted only because he was
 Muslim. In that statement lies the crux of the problem. An increasing number of Indian Muslims see the West as the enemy of Islam and it is this that makes them potential recruits for the jehadi Islam we saw on display in Islamabad’s Lal Masjid.
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