VIEW: Save the city —Sobia Ahmad Kaker

With a shift towards targeting markets, minority religious gatherings and culturally significant places, the Taliban are essentially attempting to subdue the very essence of urban life. In contemporary urban studies, such forms of political violence that target the built environment and the way of life characteristic of that environment is coined as ‘urbicide’

Urban public spaces around which people interact symbolise city life. Markets, parks, mosques and shrines, cultural and commercial buildings create activities that generate structures around which people interact and coexist. These public spaces thus increase social exchange and eventually help foster a commonality between people of different ethnic or cultural affiliations who converge to urban centres from different areas. They thus engender a feeling of coexistence that helps in building tolerance between diverse groups of people. Keeping this in view, it is important that recent suicide attacks in urban centres such as Lahore be studied in unison and not just in isolation from each other. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that in their all-out attack against the state apparatus, the Taliban are attempting to subdue the very essence of urban life, which favours heterogeneity and multiculturalism.

A careful look at the pattern of suicide attacks in Lahore from March 2009 reveals that from December 2009 onwards, the Taliban have expanded their focus from attacking specific military/police targets where civilian casualties were contained to those accidentally caught in crossfire, to attacking busy urban hubs where civilian casualties are maximised. Moreover, there appears to be a shift towards attacking those who are different from their particular brand of faith. But these reasons aside, Thursday evening’s attacks on Data Darbar were not only tragic because of the irreplaceable lives lost, but also because it was aimed at the city’s heart.

Data Darbar is possibly one of the most important cultural relics in Lahore — similar to the Lahore Fort and Badshahi Mosque. It is a place where thousands congregate to pay homage to renowned sufi saint Syed Ali Hajvery (popularly known as Data Ganj Bakhsh). For such shrines, Thursday nights are especially busy as they hold higher religious significance — thousands flock to pray for individual aspirations, distribute food to the poor, or just spend some hours in meditation. Men and women, young and old, rich and poor, sick and healthy, religious and superstitious all gather together in the enclosure in reverence to the sanctity of the tomb. It is a shared public space in a city where few such spaces that are essential hallmarks of healthy urban centres exist. Perhaps one should acknowledge that this attack does more than spread fear among the masses or deliver a blow against the security forces. Its strongest impact is an attempt to suppress multiculturalism — an important facet of urban culture.

With a shift towards targeting markets, minority religious gatherings and culturally significant places, the Taliban are essentially attempting to subdue the very essence of urban life. Their attacks against the state apparatus unarguably affect the urban fabric, which is centred around healthy market activity, coexistence between practitioners of different religious factions, and coexistence between people belonging to different religious sects. In contemporary urban studies, such forms of political violence that target the built environment and the way of life characteristic of that environment is coined as ‘urbicide’. Its aim is to destroy heterogeneity and coexistence in and through the shared spaces created by the built environment. Parallels exist in Israel’s destruction of refugee camps in Palestine and Russia’s destruction of cultural heritage sites after the 1979 Afghan invasion. How are the Taliban any different? They are as much to blame for the breakdown of urban life through attacks on mosques and markets and desecration of cultural heritage in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan.

There is more reason to strengthen the resolve to root out the Taliban from Pakistan. A country already divided along stark ethnic and linguistic identities is extremely fragile. That alone is reason enough to protect multicultural urban centres as they hold greater significance in fostering cosmopolitanism. As a threat to urban life, the Taliban are a direct threat to our national unity.

Sobia Ahmad Kaker is a graduate in Global Politics from the London School of Economics. Based in Lahore, she is currently researching on socio-political issues pertinent to Pakistan