By Ahmed Mohiuddin Siddiqui,
Phool dekhe the janazo’n pe hamesha ‘Shaukat’/ Kal meri aankh ne pholo’n ke janaaze dekhe (I had always seen flowers on corpses. Yesterday my eyes saw corpses of flowers).
The Taliban terrorist attack at an army school in Peshawar resulted in a mad mayhem and loss of over a hundred innocent children shaming the community and the humanity at large. Do we still consider ourselves as civilized? Sahir Ludhianvi had answered my question with this couplet:
Hum jo insanon ki tahzeeb liye phirte hain / Hum sa koi vahshi jungle ke darindon mein nahin (We, who consider ourselves as civilized. There is no beast like us among the predators of jungle)
Perhaps, Sahir Ludhianvi had the beasts like Taliban in his mind when he composed this couplet. There is no ideology involved in the attack. It was just revenge killings. It is alleged that the Pakistan army had targeted even the children of Taliban in Waziristan. There was a mad rush of blood and Satan overpowered the Taliban who in spite of all their false assertions about being Islamic tarnished the religion and the humanity. It is a collective failure of society – of mothers, teachers, religious scholars and the intellectuals.
Mercy is one of the attributes of a human being. The Taliban have conclusively proved that they cannot be classified as humans. In the worst of circumstances and the gravest provocations, a massacre of this scale could be compared to the killings, beheadings and bombing of children in Palestine and Syria. But what took place in Peshawar at the hands of their own people who wear religion on their sleeves is beyond human comprehension. The Talibani slaves of Satan did not even remember that the Noble Prophet of Islam Muhammad (PBUH) marched victoriously into Makkah but there was no bloodshed of his worst enemies. He had mercy and forgave them all. The little innocent children were not even the enemies of the Taliban.
Children in the sub-continent may hate to go to schools. In our country, even little children of 3 years are raped in kindergartens and nurseries. The Pakistani children may start treating schools as war zones and decide to stay away. The Taliban wants Pakistan to go back to the dark ages. Children play games of corpses without understanding the reality because they cannot reason or think as an English poet John Betjeman said, “childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.”
The game of corpses played out by children is well brought out by Mark Doty in a “A Replica of the Parthenon.” It gives an account of how he and a neighbour girl played without understanding the profound meaning of what they were doing:
“Every night we took turns dying.
One would lie down while the other
Folded the corpse’s hands and,
With the true solemnity of children,
Brought flowers.”
In Peshawar, the children did not play this game. But the game of corpses was played out on the unsuspecting children by the Taliban. Pakistan is reaping what it sowed regarding terrorism and cross border terrorism. Now, the Talibani Ajmal Kasabs are butchering even harmless little children in their own country.
Journalists cover ghastly incidents of accidents, wars etc. In Deccan Chronicle, once I was asked to cover a bus accident. When I visited the hospital and saw the mutilated bodies of the road side vegetable vendors, my intestines churned and after returning home from work, I could not put a morsel of food into my mouth. I had requested my Chief of Bureau Mr Syed Amin Jafri not to assign me crime beat again, which he was kind enough to consider favourably. But, yesterday’s massacre of children numbed my senses into inactivity because of shock. The ghastly pictures of the little children splattered with bullets and blood broadcast by television channels pushed me into a state of robotics – turning into a robot doing things mechanically. The night was the darkest with sleep being the casualty.
Oh! Little Angels of Peshawar, your blood shall not go in vain. May you adorn the Gardens of Eden and spread your light forever. The gloom and the doom are reserved for the Talibans. It is time to root out terrorism once and for all.
