JAMMU: Karachi Police Headquarters siege by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan on February 17, 2023 raises a pertinent question why Jihadis chose to inflict grievous scar in the body physique of their mentor, infamously known as Mother of Terrorism, that has been safe haven for terrorists, whose role, directly or indirectly, in terror acts across the world in general and India in particular is no more a secret now. The Karachi incident also exposes the hypocrisy of the Jihadi ecosystem that did not confer the title of ‘Shaheed’ to the killed three terrorists after storming the police chief’s complex. Imagine, had the same trio-lot of Jihadis unleashed even more grievous and heinous terror act on the Indian soil, the ecosystem would have glamorized them as heroes and martyrs.
Pakistan and its notorious spy agency Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) has been directly involved in four most sensational, among lot many of others, terror attacks on the temple of Indian democracy-Parliament on December 13, 2001, in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, in Uri on September 18, 2016 and in Pulwama on February 14, 2019. All these attacks were carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaishe-e- Muhammad. They are just the façade of the ISI and the Pakistan Army. The terrorists breeding on Pakistan soil have created havoc in Afghanistan. The terror attacks in Mexico, France and even the US had some link to Pakistan. But why don’t Pakistan or its terror outfits ever dare to unleash violence in China, notwithstanding human rights violations being carried out against the Muslims. Posing as the champion of Islamic cause, Islamabad has never ever spoken even a single word against the dragon, least to speak of engineering terror acts. There is a reason. Pakistan and Jihadis know well that any misadventure in China will mean their total annihilation.
China knows how to tackle dissent. They don’t bother what the world will say or how they would respond on the issue of human rights. True, terrorism has no religion but the Dragon knows that Jihadis generally come from the same radical mindset, which is why they show no leniency or mercy towards the prospective Jihadis. Darren Byler has given a vivid account of how China is treating Muslims in its territorial jurisdiction. In his detailed write-up in The Guardian of 11 April 2019, the columnist presents a case study of an incident over a year ago.
In mid-2017, Alim, a Uighur man in his 20s, returned to China from studying abroad. As soon as he landed back in the country, he was pulled off the plane by police officers. He was told his trip abroad meant that he was now under suspicion of being “unsafe”. The police administered what they call a “health check”, which involved collecting several types of biometric data, including DNA, blood type, fingerprints, voice recordings and face scans – a process that all adults in north-west China are expected to undergo. After his “health check”, Alim was transported to one of the hundreds of concentration camps that dot north-west China. These centres have become an important part of what Xi Jinping’s government calls the “people’s war on terror”, a campaign launched in 2014, which focuses on Xinjiang, a region with a population of roughly 25 million people, just under half of whom are Uighur Muslims. As part of this campaign, the Chinese government has come to treat almost all expressions of Uighur Islamic faith as signs of potential religious extremism and ethnic separatism. Since 2017 alone, more than 1 million Turkic Muslims, including Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and others, have moved through detention centres.
Many of the detainees had been arrested for having supposedly committed religious and political transgressions through social media apps on their smartphones, which Uighurs are required to produce at checkpoints around . Although there was often no real evidence of a crime according to any legal standard, the digital footprint of unauthorised Islamic practice, or even a connection to someone who had committed one of these vague violations, was enough to land Uighurs in a detention centre. The mere fact of having a family member abroad, or of travelling outside China, as Alim had, often resulted in detention.
Most Uighurs in the detention centres are on their way to serving long prison sentences, or to indefinite captivity in a growing network of internment camps, which the Chinese state has described as facilities for “transformation through education”. , which function as medium-security prisons and, in some cases, forced-labour factories, attempt to train Uighurs to disavow their Islamic identity and embrace the secular principles of the Chinese state. They forbid the use of the Uighur language and instead offer drills in Mandarin, the language of China’s Han majority.
Alim learned that he had been placed on a blacklist maintained by the , a regional data system that uses AI to monitor the countless checkpoints in and around Xinjiang’s cities. Any attempt to enter public institutions such as hospitals, banks, parks or shopping centres, or to cross beyond the boundaries of his local police precinct, would trigger the Ijop to alert police. The system had profiled him and predicted that he was a potential terrorist.
The story of Alim is a lesson for the countries facing Pakistan sponsored terrorism, where Jihadis are found in every arena-politics, bureaucracy, socio-political landscape. They go unscathing and at times receive VIP treatment. If these countries, India included, will emulate China there will be no Yasin Malik getting red carpet reception by the Prime Minister or Burhan Wani, glamourised as the youth icon.