The father-in-law-son-in-law duo of Sufi Mohammad and Fazlullah have acted like bandits for years now, terrorising the traditionally peace-loving and docile Swatis. Taliban vigilantes under their command have been blowing up public infrastructure, including the Swat airport, power houses and several tourist resorts. They have been beheading their opponents in public execution stunts, destroying girls’ schools and colleges, killing barbers who dare to offer a shaving service to men; enforcing a dress code, systematically brutalising women who step out of the house and burning down music shops have been their preoccupation. Is this the vision the government has for a progressive Pakistan, free of terrorism?

The people of Swat deserve better, not least because in last year’s election they had voted for the same secular parties, the People’s Party and the Awami National Party (PPP and ANP), which have now buckled under pressure and bargained their electorates’ basic rights away. It is some measure of their medieval mindset that after declaring war on the state, the Taliban had forced vehicles entering the Swat valley to drive on the right hand (wrong) side of the road because driving on the left was supposedly un-Islamic. So are women’s education and men without beards.

Swat was the country’s favourite tourist destination dotted with pre-Islamic national heritage sites until the two clerics started flexing their muscles. This is not the first time the government has struck a so-called peace deal with them. The Benazir Bhutto government back in 1994 had also reached a similar agreement whereby Sharia laws were promulgated in the region. Then, in 1999, the Sharif government had offered more if the mullahs refrained from recruiting young men for jihad in Afghanistan. The Musharraf regime, too, soft-peddled the issue, allowing an illegal anti-state propaganda FM radio station to continue, but there was no end to the demands made by the clerics and their vigilante goons who went around enforcing Sharia at gunpoint. Since 2007, there has been utter lawlessness in the valley; the army was reluctantly forced to launch a clean-up operation after the local police ran for their lives.

... contd.