Rising swing for Radicalization

In the past one week there were two incidents which tend to suggest that Radicalization is no more confined to some seminaries, as many would think. Actually, it has radiated to the country's high-profile educational institutions and is proliferating. In Mardan, the Abdul Wali Khan University student Mashal Khan was lynched by a mob alleging that he had committed blasphemy. Then there was this incident of two clerics who tried to disrupt his funeral at his hometown. In Lahore, a female student of a medical university, Noreen Leghari, was arrested following an encounter with security forces that were on the trail of a terrorist group which had planned to attack a ceremony related to Easter. Having gone missing from her home in February she is believed to have just returned from the "land of khilafat." The crowd that delivered mob justice on the campus of the university in Mardan mostly comprised Mashal's fellow students. And Noreen is believed to be one of the dozen or so female students of higher educational institutions who too are missing from their homes and were apparently recruited with the help of today's information technology. Given these two and many other less media-focused incidents it would not be valid to argue that extremism and terrorism are by-products of ignorance and poverty, and that the primordial mindset is instilled into the minds of students of village schools and religious madrassahs. The disease seems to have acquired epidemic proportions in Pakistan - and you may relate it to religion or to a host of other causes that need to be addressed, though not much is in sight to suggest if that was being done. Resultantly, the country is faced today with an unprecedented and devastating wave of extremism and terrorism.
The question is: what then the causes for relatively higher Radicalization in Pakistan as compared to many other Muslim states, even when they seem to be fighting to defeat the curse of terrorism on their soil? Our security forces have performed a heroic role in eradication of terrorism from the terrorist-infested areas, even inside cities, as they also regularly conduct counter-terrorism operations, exacting a heavy toll of life from terrorist groups. Much is still unknown as to why. But what can be perceived as the possible cause of higher radicalism in Pakistan is the fact that as a society we may be against violence but we are not opposed to the agenda of the extremists. Then there are nearly one hundred networks of the militants and Taliban groups, some on the ground and some sent in from abroad as the need arises. Outlawing them is certainly a huge challenge - this being very tedious since it is not being done with the zeal and vigour it deserves. Then there is the problem that most of our political parties have their student wings which, when needed, are fielded in to raise street pressure to get things done the way they like. One other factor that kicks in the urge for Radicalization is the failure of successive governments to deliver on good governance, which in turn promotes a sense of frustration, particularly on the campus. There it tends to spread more thickly, given that young minds are easy to be attracted to weird ideas and ideologies - in no small part due to the backward-looking education they are receiving for decades. It takes much less time with the youth to be impacted by the incidence of injustice, inequality, identity crisis and inadequacy of the state's delivery systems. It popularises the call for Radicalization. But against it the state's counter-Radicalization measures lack sustainability. These are generally one-time operations, short-lived and quite often are allowed to wither on the vine. Of course, we do notice the political elites and civil society leaderships forcefully reacting to incidents like the one that happened at the campus of Abdul Wali Khan University in Mardan. But there would be no follow-up in terms of sustaining that pressure or legislating anti-extremism and anti-sectarian legislation. That's a huge mistake; it must change if the 40 million-plus youth are to be kept safe and inaccessible to agents who recruit volunteers for radicalism from this rich reserve.