By Khaled Ahmed
On Aug. 15, the same day that interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan presented his government’s national-security policy to Parliament, 51-year-old Mohammad Sikandar drove his wife and two children to Islamabad for an hours-long, made-for-TV showdown with police in the middle of the road that leads to Parliament.
Sikandar, the son of a land-records functionary in Hafizabad, Punjab, was armed with a Kalashnikov and a submachine gun. He made his demands—forwarded on a piece of paper by his wife, who was not opposed to what he was doing—known to a police officer. Sikandar called for disbanding the elected government currently in power and for imposing a truly Islamic system on Pakistan. If his demands could not be met, Sikandar said he wished to be killed and buried at sea—like Osama bin Laden.
Semiliterate Sikandar mouthed the myths created by the state of Pakistan back at it. He aped the terrorists at the unconscious level, adopting their appeals to the broken pledges of the ideological state, and clearly embraced the rhetoric of religious parties who accept the status quo with strong, clearly expressed reservations of the “incomplete state.” He also resorted to the line adopted by Al Qaeda after its top leader’s death—and supported by Pakistan—that bin Laden’s murder was wrong. He added to it the universally accepted “truism” in the country that the state of Pakistan is a “slave” of America.
His father-in-law told the media that Sikandar was mentally disturbed—“had psychological problems”—but was not linked to any religious organization. This could be said about most Pakistanis because the collective mind has been molded by the state to justify its stance until it looks abnormal to any objective observer. (An objective observer has to be either a foreigner or a Pakistani who has “sold himself to foreign powers.”)
