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| India-Pakistan |
| Another Lal Masjid in the Making? |
| 2008-06-22 |
| By Ahmad Bilal In April, I had to make an emergency trip to Pakistan due to declining health of my father. Since my last couple of trips had been very short, this was after more than two years that I was visiting Pakistan for four weeks, most of them to be spent in my hometown of Bahawalpur. When I had visited back in 2005, it was a visit after 4 years, so new roads and cell phones in every hand looked quite fresh. This time, at least on the surface, little seemed to have changed since my last trip. On my way home from the airport, it looked like the same old desert town of Bahawalpur. The date palms, the early summer heat, the dust and the desert wind were all too familiar. As the car stopped at the main gate of my parents’ house, a poster pasted on the gate caught my attention. The title of the poster was “Azmat-e-Quran Conference”. And the key speaker was going to be someone named Masood Azhar. Why did the name sound familiar? I thought about it for a moment, but then as the car moved in, the happy feeling of meeting my parents again overwhelmed me and I quite forgot about it all. The next few days were spent making courtesy calls and getting over the jet lag. Then came the day when I was fresh again to go out and meet relatives and family friends in the city. As I went out, I saw the same poster pasted all over the city with a lot of white flags hoisted on all major intersections. I wondered what was going on, and the name Masood Azhar clicked with some old memories of watching this man on the news a long time ago. Yes, he was the same Masood Azhar who founded the Jaish-e-Muhammad organization and served time in Indian jails before getting freed through hijacking of an Indian Airlines jet. |
| Posted by:john frum |