A ’religious fanatic’ murdered Punjab’s welfare
minister, Zille Huma Usman, in broad daylight
Tuesday as she was about to address an open
session of her ’meet-the-people’ pre-election
routine at the Muslim League House in Gujranwala.
The killer was Maulvi Sarwar and the press has
tried to play down his heinous crime by calling
him an ’Islamist’.

In fact, the man is a stereotypical follower of
the religious parties. He has serial-killed women
in the past but was prevented from being punished
by his powerful religio-political patrons. The
fact also is that by Gujranwala standards, he was
no fanatic, just a product of Gujranwala where
the religious parties are strong and the city has
contributed the largest number of youthful
’martyrs’ to the earlier state-run jihad in
Kashmir.

Maulvi Sarwar is supposed to have disapproved of
women in public life. But this was not sticky
personal matter. He was simply following the MMA
manifesto against the inclusion of women’s
special seats in the assemblies. (The deceased
minister was inducted on one of these seats by
the ruling party.)

If the religious alliance is not worried about
the consequences of its ’Islamic’ teachings, the
rest of the nation should certainly be, because
it gives the largest number of votes to a woman
called Benazir Bhutto.

Minister Zille Huma Usman was only 37 and was
dreaming of a life of freedom for the daughters
of Gujranwala. She had organised the ’marathon’
for them in 2005 in Gujranwala which was attacked
by the local seminary aligned to the MMA.
Unfortunately, far from challenging the seminary
at the time and siding with Ms Huma, the
provincial government had kowtowed and called off
all ’mixed marathons’ in the province which
finally meant that girls stayed indoors.

The minister had received death threats for
several months. Most probably they came after it
was heard that she was planning another marathon
for Gujranwala girls. Who were the people behind
these threats? They were the same people who
repeatedly saved the serial killer Maulvi Sarwar
from being tried and hanged because "he was
following his Islamic conscience" and cleansing
the city of sin.

Let us take a look at this Maulvi Sarwar. The man
had earlier murdered seven women described in the
press as ’call girls’ in Gujranwala and Lahore.
He was arrested once and confessed to killing the
’sinful women’; he was let off after one year
because of lack of evidence but, more accurately,
because of religious support. His patrons,
according to the police, had “paid off” the
relatives of the killed and been reprieved under
’Islamic’ laws. There is nothing new in this.
Anybody who knows the decade of religious mayhem
in Karachi knows how criminals are protected from
punishment by powerful patrons.

If our universities had not already been
’conquered’ by the religious parties they could
have done a sociological profile of Gujranwala as
a city without a soul and a dangerous tendency
towards punishing all kinds of ’entertainers’,
often with death. No one could imagine a decade
ago that Gujranwala would become so violently
Islamist in the future. No doubt it was becoming
a wayside city that was growing by accretion
without an intellectual mooring, more or less
like Faisalabad that began well under the British
but declined spiritually afterwards.

After General Zia ul Haq’s Islamisation,
Gujranwala began to produce jihadis and turned
inward, scrutinising its citizens for moral
backslidings. It first turned on the minorities
and produced the famous Salamat Masih Case,
accusing an under-age Christian child of
insulting the Holy Prophet (PBUH). A religious
party attacked him and his co-accused in Lahore
when they were coming to attend the High Court,
killing one. Salamat Masih had to be sent out of
Pakistan to save his life.

The second famous Gujranwala case was about a
hafiz of Quran and amateur doctor who
accidentally dropped his copy of the Holy Quran
in the fire and was reported over the loudspeaker
by a local cleric. His neighbours came out and
burnt him alive. The rural nature of the
population was expressed in the way the citizens
mistook the word atai (quack doctor) applied to
the victim over the loudspeaker, for asai
(Christian). In other words, in Gujranwala one
doesn’t have to check the facts before killing a
non-Muslim!

Meanwhile, because of the atmosphere of extremism
created by the clergy, some citizens like Maulvi
Sarwar took to killing women they suspected of
fahashi. Maulvi Sarwar began killing women in
2002 after listening to the most powerful cleric
of the city (who shall remain unnamed) calling
down the wrath of God on the entertainers that
performed in the seven theatres of Gujranwala. He
was not the only one who was inspired. The city’s
police and the magistracy equally took part in
’acts of piety’ by arresting actresses from the
city theatres. Only Maulvi Sarwar went further
than that.

He turned a serial killer and first murdered two
dancing girls of Gujranwala, but went scot-free
because witnesses who had earlier deposed against
him quickly recanted under threat or inducement.
He was now wanted only in one case of injuring a
dancing girl after an attempt to murder her.
After that, he went around catching dancing girls
outside cinema halls and theatres and hotels and
shooting them to death. In each case he was let
off because many powerful people seemed to
actually enjoy or approve of what he was doing.
The method was the same: witnesses either
recanted or were made to recant.

The politicians did nothing in Lahore. In fact
one not-very-reputable politician of Gujranwala
whose newly elected son was given the portfolio
of culture complained to the chief minister that
culture was a morally incorrect portfolio as it
was not allowed by Islam!

Today the press has forgotten the dark past of
the city that has killed a young minister who
thought of bringing progress to it. While jihad
was at its height in the 1990s, the state
sacrificed the fourth largest city of Pakistan to
’martyrdom’ in Kashmir. Now most cities of the
country are becoming like Gujranwala. And the
politician and the officer are still slumbering. *