WE shoot ourselves in the foot with predictable regularity. Take the release of Hafiz Mohammad Saeed from house arrest, for example.
Picked up in the crackdown on the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba’s successor, in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks last November, Saeed spent around six months in “custody” before being sprung recently by the Lahore high court on grounds of insufficient evidence.
This is not the first time clerics accused of sundry crimes of violence have walked out of comfortable sojourns at home. Another leader of a jihadi outfit was arrested some seven years ago following attacks on the Srinagar Assembly that killed 30. Days later, the Parliament building in New Delhi was attacked, and again Jaish-e-Mohammad was implicated.
After the usual dance of denial, Maulana Masood Azhar was arrested and, later, the Jaish was banned. Nevertheless, relations between India and Pakistan plunged, and the two countries came close to war. For months, their respective armies were eyeball to eyeball, and the world feared a nuclear exchange.
Even then, the Maulana was no stranger to legal restrictions: he had been arrested by Indian authorities in Kashmir in 1994, and released in a deal to free hostages taken in an Indian Airlines plane hijacking in December 1999. Although Pakistan initially denied he had entered the country from Afghanistan after his release, Masood Azhar soon addressed a rally in Karachi where he said: “I have come here because it is my duty to tell you that Muslims should not rest in peace until we have destroyed America and India”.
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