An Excessively Deluded Case

Malalah Yusufzai case, badly obscured in the dust of propaganda, is too intricate to be easily understood. Evil designs of many of the open and hidden actors rest on how much it is exaggerated and manipulated. Things are getting entwined with each other. Details of the wrongdoings and terror activities of Taliban started appearing on BBC blog as the diary of Malalah Yusufzai. She was born in 1997 to a progressive minded administrator of a chain of Khushal Public Schools in Mingora town in district Swat. In her early teen age of 11, what was transmitted with the name ‘Gul Makai’ was much higher than the level she was having then.  Actually all was done by the BBC reporter Abdul Haee Kakkar to make the brutalities of Taliban known to the outer world.

We admit Malalah is a brave girl and appreciate her love for education and also her views about the importance of education for the girls, especially in the areas under the Taliban control. She won the prominence when her diary (BBC video Schools Dismissed) started appearing on the BBC blog in 2009. Apart from her mature thinking temptations of her father have been a bigger incentive for introducing Malalah as a promoter of female education and an anti-terrorism activist. At first another girl named Aisha was chosen as the writer of diary for BBC but her parents stopped her from going long with the activity. Reward offers for the venture by the powers behind the plan were so high that Malalah’s father Ziauddin Yusufzai was easily allured to present his daughter for helping in media hype against Taliban under Maulvi Fazlullah, pestiferous and notorious for his destructive activities and blowing up the girls’ schools in Bajor and Swat.

It swiftly paid. She became the favorite of not only the American and Pakistani authorities but also of all the liberal minded intellectuals, columnists, journalists, ultra-modern civil society and human rights activists and western paid NGOs. She herself didn’t hide her feelings about Barak Obama to be at the top of her favorite personalities. Footages showing Malalah and her parents in meetings with the late Richard Holbrook, US Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and other American officials are now open in media.  Many other elements tending to spread anti-Islam feelings but disguising themselves as anti-terror were ready to patronize this innocent soul. Conferring of different awards including Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize brought a lot to this intelligent girl.

October 9, 2012 was a sad day when she was shot in her head while returning home in her school bus. Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a mysterious and delusive face with their ravaging steps mostly proving good for the Americans, failed not for a moment in taking the responsibility of shooting Malalah. Hitting the women in the battles is not only an abominable act in Islam but it is also against the Pashtun and tribal traditions. So naturally still many people are not ready to believe that assault on Malalah was the act of any Pashtun. Ehsanullah Ehsan, so-called spokesman of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan is a dubious character.

 Though the number of the victims of drone attacks, suicide attacks, bomb blasts, helicopter shelling and gun firings, including children, women, elderly people goes above thousands but Malalah, with heavily concocted evidences and magnified media projection,  rose as an icon of resistance against illiteracy, ignorance, extremism, militancy and terrorism. Malalah’s tragedy is likely to be a good justification for those who, for a long time, have been pressurizing the leadership of our armed forces to launch a heavy military operation in North Wazirastan.