COMMENT : We need a new constitution — Yasser Latif Hamdani

No serious attempt was made by Pakistanis to create a constituent assembly that was broad-based and representative of all positions in Pakistan

The fire in Mardan’s Church had not been doused when Ghulam Ahmad Bilour, our senior federal minister and a member of the ‘secular’ and ‘non-violent’ Awami National Party (ANP), put a bounty on the head of the filmmaker and called upon al Qaeda and the Taliban to carry out the act. In return, he has been indemnified by the Taliban against all future attacks. The ANP is making a lot of noise trying to distance itself from Bilour’s statement but the truth is that you cannot fool all the people, all the time.

The ANP and before them the Khudai Khidmatgars have a history of such duplicitous politics dating back to the pre-partition days with Ghani Khan, the son of their most illustrious antecedent Khan Abdul Ghaffar ‘Bacha’ Khan. He visited and pledged moral support to the ‘president of Pakhtunistan’ Faqir of Ipi when the latter declared his jihad against the state of Pakistan for being un-Islamic. Faqir’s grandson Gul Bahadur Khan is a leading light of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. The secular and non-violent ANP was also part of the Nizam-e-Mustafa campaign against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government in 1977. Their relations with General Zia were always cordial. Bacha Khan in his last days fervently corresponded with the dictator and apparently, General Zia held the grand old man of Pushtun nationalism in such high regard that he accompanied Rajiv Gandhi in his funeral. General Zia also rewarded Ghani Khan, who had abused Jinnah in his book on the Pathans, with the Sitara-e-Imtiaz in 1980. I can go on but the point of this article is not to bash the ANP and their brand of ‘secularism’ and ‘non-violence,’ which seems rather malleable to whatever situation they face at a given time.

More: