Lal Masjid: the day after

Ironically, the 'Operation Silence' has ended on a deafening note. Anything that could go wrong in this attempt at cleansing the Lal Masjid complex of militants did, at times, appear to go wrong but mercifully did not.
A commando operation that for some reason was expected by most people to achieve its objectives in a matter of three or four hours, lasted some 15 hours; could rescue less than a hundred hostages from the supposedly five to six hundred allegedly held by the militants; and resulted in deaths on both sides variously placed by the officials and by other observers. Then, a punishing curfew literally had brought to halt almost half of the Capital city.
Thank God, the Operation Silence is over and the city is fast returning to its lazy pace, but the people are now asking questions that need to be answered to avert the possibility of another Lal Masjid saga.
These questions relate to the genesis of the problem, in that how a mosque became the hub of extremist activities, who allowed it to function with immunity from the prying eye of intelligence agencies and who did not care as its compound expanded beyond its boundary in a city where removal of illegal encroachments is the order of the day.
Then, there are questions about the conduct of the operation and why it could not be averted. Operating from the heart of Capital the students of the Lal Masjid-affiliated Hafsa Madrassa had illegally occupied the Children's Library, abducted the "sinners" from a nearby house, and had stormed and kidnapped Chinese workers from a massage parlour, but there was no action by the government.
Why? People also want to know why the planners of the operation overlooked the possibility that the militants would take students of the Hafsa seminary as hostage and use them as a human shield, and why the residents of adjoining area had to suffer long spells of curfew without water, gas and power.
Could the rebellious militants be given safe passage? is one more such question. Then, if the PTV coverage of chief Imam Abdul Aziz was unacceptably humiliating, why the access made available to other channels was such that while they did create a lot of noise they were unable to tell the whole truth?
Let there be an independent inquiry by a high-powered judicial commission to look into all these questions and fix responsibility. As to the question why the talks between the government and Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi, mediated by a group of Ulema, failed, a debate has already erupted. It may lead nowhere because Ghazi is gone and the other two sides vehemently contest each other's stand.
But the fear that the Lal Masjid episode can trigger a severe backlash is there. People in NWFP, particularly in the Swat-Malakand region from where the bulk of students hailed, are already protesting with the possibility of these protests spreading to other areas.
The constitution of a judicial commission can defuse the anger. Since the government has a fairly strong case to defend, it should not hesitate in setting up the judicial commission. On the other hand, its refusal to do so can undermine both the validity of the official position and the cause of national integration and cohesion.
Meanwhile, the issue of Madrassas needs to be revisited in its totality. These institutions are a reality and cannot be wished away by just dubbing them as 'hatcheries of suicide bombers'. According to the National Education Census, there are about 13,000 Madrassas in the country, including 77 that located in Islamabad Capital Territory.
They cater to the needs of some 1.4 million students, mostly poor coming from backward areas. A few of these may be the 'hatcheries' that produce suicide bombers but not the majority of them. The fact is that suicide-bombing is a phenomenon, as demonstrated by hundreds of suicide-bombings carried out by Tamil Tigers and Palestinian freedom fighters, that stems from a variety of causes, of which religion is just one.
In our case, however, there are two different and very often clashing worldviews that are imbibed by the students of regular schools and Madrassas. To bridge that chasm of mismatching perceptions and priorities the government is required to increase interaction between the Madrassas and mainstream schools by injecting in more funds by way of providing them better teachers and teaching techniques.
At the same time, the government should introduce some kind of a system that can oversee the functioning of Madrassas by ensuring visits by inspectors. Terrorism and Madrassas are two separate subjects and should be treated so. What the government did and what it should have done and how to prevent another Lal Masjid, these are questions the answers to which would emerge only from the findings of a judicial commission. There is perhaps no other way to avert such a tragedy happening again.