Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. This famous Mark Twain quote has been echoing in my brain since I heard the news of Amjad Sabri’s assassination.

Undoubtedly, the broad daylight killing of a mystic singer is a thing of great concern, but what is actually killing me is the way the nation reacted to the incident. A lot of people seem sick and tired of the phenomenon and already lashed out at the typical feed, kill, repeat response from all sides.

The same kinds of condemnations from certain concerned groups, same promises from law enforcers and the government, and same jubilations by the mighty Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) whose working beat has now shrank to the killing of innocent women, children and citizens since the Pakistan Army has rattled their ranks.

They are the same machos who had promised to take over Pakistan and its nuclear weapons, while ending up hoisting their flag across the world under their perceived version of Muslim caliphate in spades. Pity the clowns have to now live with bombing parks, hospitals and small scale celebrities to survive in the limelight.

Thus they have gone weaker since the military operation but it seems that our counter intelligence and political thinkers are failing to completely eliminate the jokers they (establishment) themselves used to feed. They are still managing to survive under the nose of concerned authorities and keeping their fading guerrilla war against Pakistan alive.

Yes, guerrilla war they have launched against the nation. As the father of modern guerrilla warfare Che Guerra had written in his book Guerrilla Warfare the phenomenon can survive without food, weapons or medicines, but can’t exist without the help of local people. Because it’s the majority which gives the guerrillas an opportunity to launch attacks against their adversaries and then come back to vanish among common people.

By common people, I am talking about the Pakistanis – you and me. The kind of rhetoric I have seen over the killing of Sabri on social media is really nauseating and equally disturbing. One can clearly see the nation is not standing united against these demons, as a lot of us are busy debating whether the deceased was a martyr or a normal dead body, a Sufi singer or a “miraasi”; a noble man or a blasphemer; a Shia or a Sunni.

To the mates having their noses dipped into this shi*, it’s not your fault. Yes you read it right; it’s not your fault. The Oscar, here, goes to the Pakistani establishment that radicalized you through the harmless looking school text books and very benign PTV through the course of more than 4 decades.

They did it to grind their own axe in Afghanistan and Kashmir, and also to please some other fair weather friends. Most of us have been turned into robots, jihadi ones. What to do now? Nothing. Perhaps we’ll have to wait for a couple of generations and the right wind to free a nation of Pakistanis from such cancers.

It’s bad news though. But as Mohsin Naqvi said Bura naa maan mera harf zehr zehr sahi; main kya karoon keh yehi zaiqa zuban kaa hai. What can one do? Nothing; just sit behind and watch Rome burning. Not because one is fond of flute playing, but because today’s Rome has gone suicidal.

Perhaps the fault lies with the idea of seeking isolated lands for a certain caste or creed. The state of Israel is a twin sister of Pakistan in that sense and despite being multiple times better than us in almost all intellectual and developmental aspects, they are also facing the same dilemma in their own society.

The evil is called right wing radicals and in Israel too they are going crazier day by day; although they might be on the rising end of the tide unlike their Pakistani counterparts. But another aspect is that they are developing in the field of knowledge and acknowledge unlike us.

Right wing radicals, mujahids and sevak sangs are unfortunately on rise across the world. It seems as if every establishment needs their kind strategic depths. It is clearly visible that communal hatred and extremism have reached unprecedented levels in Pakistan and despite an ease into the crazy suicide bombings and man slaughter, the extremist organizations seem to enjoy some level of impunity in the society, thanks to the decades-long brainwashing and the establishment’s fear of needing to consume the strategic-depth against their archrivals sometimes soon. 

However, the good news is that some kind of sanity is now prevailing among the crazy ones too in Pakistan and now they are not claiming that Sabri got himself killed to malign the country, the way they claimed regarding all the previous critics of mullahs or establishment such as Malala Yousafzai, Hamid Mir and Saleem Shahzad.

Our heroes and ideals have changed and the descendants of Sufis have replaced Baba Farid, Rehman Baba, Khoshal Khan Khattak, Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, Madhu Lal Shah Hussain, Sachal Sarmast, Sarmad, Dara Shikoh, Ali Hajveri, Moeen ud Din Chishti and Nizam ud Din Aulia with the symbols of war such as Ahmad Shah Abdali, Mahmood Ghaznavi, Muhammad bin Qasim, Aurengzeb, Zaheer ud Din Babar, etc.

This is a part of the global radicalization that has hit the Muslim world as a whole, thanks to the imperialist designs of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Ironically, one sees no wave of terrorism or chaos inside both of the torch-bearers of communal Islam, while the rest of the Muslim world is fighting each other like cats and dogs.

Just for the context to my fellow Pakistanis I would like to point out that the declining breathing space and reign of conspiracy theories are making the whole country look like a project of Fundamentalists Latter Day Saints (FLDS) also known as American Taliban.

How pathetic it is that we still live in a state of intolerance and half-truth, which empowers the radicals and poisons the social values. The biggest achievement of such radicals is that they have managed to develop a huge number of sympathizers across the country and are promising to survive as parasites to this otherwise gifted nation.

Unbowed, unbent, unbroken corroboration of social evils that imperils the very existence of moral attributes in our society. O people pay attention and stop following the treacherous trail of rigidity and stubbornness, which envenoms the whole society remorselessly.