Aye...aye General !
I find myself partly agreeing & partly disagreeing with your analysis & recommendations.
I agree that between the Saudis, the Iranians & our local Molvis we have an absolute nightmare on our hands; we saw its beginnings in the '80s & the '90s & now in the '00s we see it nearly reaching its climax. At the same time I do truly believe that the Molvi of perhaps 5 years ago was stronger than the Molvi of today in that I've experience common men & women speaking with disdain about our religious clerics & their not so holy or remotely wholesome contributions to Islam & our society. Its a beginning & it will take time but I do truly believe that the worst is behind us in that there seems to be much greater appreciation for the nefarious role that Molvi has played in our society than has ever been in our History (perhaps the early '50s being the exception when we had just tasted what the Congressi Molvis had been doing to us) which means that in due course of time the Molvi would find more space being denied to him. At the same time let it not be said that Molvi hasn't enough clout as it is to be a serious nut cracker for us but its slowly diminishing & thats the good news.
What I respectfully disagree with you & others on is how we deal with the situation. For me a heavy handed approach is absolutely out of the picture for it would be most counter-productive & would give the initiative to the Molvi again to further polarize an already deeply divided society. What we need to instead is to take the Islam narrative back from the Molvi, reduce his credibility & target his 'target audience' to be less gullible & more rational in their approach. All of those things require a great deal of tact & more so public perception management - two things that we have been woefully negligent in since back to the beginning.
I would imagine, in my limited understanding, that a four pronged approach is what is required to achieve all of this :
(i) Credible Leadership in that right now, baring Imran Khan, every other politician in Pakistan has huge spots over their credibility & perhaps even Imran Khan himself in that some of the inductions in the PTI have left a lot to be desired off.
(ii) Good Governance to ensure that credibility is further enhance & everything from the Jihad narrative to socio-economic discrimination by one ethnic group against the other is taken away from the perpetrators of such divisive movements.
(iii) Perhaps the Government would do well to borrow the Tabdeeli Razakar idea from PTI & help its more wholesome agendas permeate down to the masses so that Public Perception can be managed further in our favor & additionally the efforts of these divisive movements that really do have grass-root workers spreading their bile, is blunted a bit.
(iv) Perhaps one can do well to look to the Army & appreciate it for how there exists no Shia-Sunni, Muslim-Non-Muslim or even Punjabi-Pukhtoon-Baluch BS in it & that truly the Army has been quite successful in galvanizing its recruits in an over-arching singular identity that these other ethno-linguistic & religious identities are an extension of as opposed to something that is wholly at loggerheads with each other & that over-arching identity. Perhaps some form of compulsory service to the State for a period of 1.5-2 years should be looked at; perhaps not the Army but some other form of National Service - Construction work, Social Work, Labor for other State sponsored Public Welfare projects.
Naturally all of this is wholly rudimentary in nature & has, like anything else of such a nature, the propensity of being a complete waste of time at best or an institutionalized impediment for progress, at the very worse.
At any rate, I do believe that social evolution is a very good usher of change & these things will eventually rectify themselves; the trick is to help nudge the social evolution at an accelerated rate lest the change comes when Pakistan is no more.
But of course, all of the above could be a load of trash completely disconnected from the ground realities of Pakistan seeing that its typed out by a person who is sitting comfortably in his room right now munching on Nandos (Damn that Peri..Peri sauce is hot !) !
Sad day. I hope the culprits are brought forward.
