Fighting India, overtly and covertly, has historically been the raison d’être of the Pakistan Army. So when Pakistani terrorists shot dead 26 civilians near Pahalgam on April 22, all eyes turned to the Pakistan Army and its proxies.
Only a week ago, Chief of the Army Staff General Asim Munir, the most powerful man in Pakistan, had made a provocative speech which New Delhi views as having encouraged the terrorists.
Calling Kashmir Pakistan’s “jugular vein” — a framing first used by Muhammad Ali Jinnah — the Pak Army chief said in Islamabad on April 15 that Pakistan “will not leave its Kashmiri brothers.”
In February, at an event in Muzaffarabad in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK), Munir had gone a step further. “Cutting the jugular vein off the body means the end of life,” he had said, adding that “Allah’s… (Muslim fighters) will always prevail based on faith, piety, and jihad in the way of Allah.”
‘The mullah general’
As Pakistani generals go, Munir, 57, is an outlier in more ways than one.
As the Pak Army chief, Munir freely uses Quranic verses and Islamic theology in his speeches, switching seamlessly from English or Urdu to classical Arabic.
“Till date, there have been only two states which have been built on the foundation of the Kalma… first was the Riyasat-e-Tayyaba (or Riyasat-e-Medina, the first Islamic state established by the Prophet)… and the second, which Allah built 1,300 years later, is your country (Pakistan),” Munir said on April 15.
Clues to Munir’s religiosity lie in his origins. Unlike many of his peers in the top echelons of the Pak Army, he does not belong to a pedigreed military family. Instead, his father, who arrived in Rawalpindi from Jalandhar
Munir received his early education at the Markazi Madrasah Dar-ul-Tajweed, an Islamic seminary in Rawalpindi. He then graduated from the Officers Training School at Mangla in 1986 — not the more prestigious Pakistan Military Academy in Abbottabad — and was commissioned into the 23rd Battalion of the Frontier Force Regiment.
This was at the height of General Zia ul-Haq’s rule. “Munir is the culmination of changes that Zia-ul-Haq set in motion as a promoter of overt religiosity in the (Pak) Army,
