Deprivation

Much debate goes on these days to determine whether extremist tendencies in young men are the result of brainwashing on religious grounds or whether acute economic deprivation is responsible.
The percentage of literate men involving themselves in extremist acts is much smaller as compared with uneducated and unemployed hordes of wayfarers falling prey to it.
A few days back, there was a suicide attack on the political office of MNA Amjad Farooq Khosa in Taunsa, district Dera Ghazi Khan. While seven people were killed and 14 wounded in the bomb blast, fortunately Khosa was not present at his office. To maximise the impact of the attack, the attacker chose to strike when the maximum number of people were expected to be present in the premises.
According to reports, Amjad Khosa, an old Ravian and law graduate, had no personal enmity with anyone. The reticent and soft-spoken Khosa, who has a large personal library of books mainly on history and politics, always travels alone with his driver without the usual posse of personal guards. Whoever wanted to eliminate him wanted to do so certainly not because of any personal grudge against such a person.
What motivation did the teenage attacker have to blow himself up? Who were his handlers? What was their agenda? It is the duty of intelligence networks to find out. Intel agencies often forewarn of threats, which is not enough. If the agencies knew what was coming, why couldn’t they thwart it?
Districts like Dera Ghazi Khan, Jhang and Muzaffargarh are considered the backwaters of Punjab. The literacy rate there is low and religious extremism holds sway. Illiteracy and unemployment are a lethal combination that incites class hatred in the society. Compare these districts with let’s say Sialkot. One rarely hears of an act of terrorism there because people have no time for it.
Some years ago, I had to visit Sialkot every week and was surprised to see people hurrying in their cars and motorbikes from one place to another. They had deadlines to meet in the exports-oriented city.
D G Khan won’t transform into Sialkot but the sparsely populated division with a large land mass has its own indigenous resources to explore. The Suleman mountain range contains huge deposits of metals and minerals. An entrepreneur who invested hundreds of millions for his excavation projects deep into the mountain range could not be sanctioned the necessary chemical material to blast hard rocks on the pretext that such chemicals could be used in terror activities.
What a preposterous argument. To protect the hazardous material, safety procedures could be implemented easily. The plant the prospector wanted to run – of 500 tons per hour capacity – could have provided employment opportunities to hundreds of households in the poverty-stricken backward area. We’re talking about the rocky and mountainous terrain where women fetch drinking water from distant streams. What a grim reality!
A low-key demand for a separate Seraiki province comprising the Seraiki-speaking belt has existed for a long time. The reason for it is simple. When mega cities in central Punjab have metro buses, signal free corridors, and orange trains, the villagers in remote areas of southern Punjab at least deserve to get clean drinking water and opportunities to earn two meals a day. That meal, of course, is not a fraction of what a trendy eatery at M M Alam Road offers in its buffet.
While Ayesha Mumtaz could find fault with the kitchens of upscale culinary outlets, she could find nothing stale about an onion-over-chapatti meal gratefully savoured under a tree in the DGK mountain range. The stark disparity between the super-rich and dirt poor of society is disquieting. It breeds hatred against those who have it all. Call it extremism or terrorism, if you will.
The writer is a freelance columnist based in Lahore.
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