Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone surviving Mumbai attacker who is currently being tried by an Indian anti-terror court, isn't the only notorious Kasab from Pakistan. There have been at least two other Kasabs, all "religious crackpots", according to a leading columnist.
"What's with this name, Kasab (sometimes also spelled with a Q)? There have been three (in) famous Kasabs in Pakistan -- and all of them religious crackpots!" Nadeem F Paracha wrote in a daily.
According to Paracha, the first person with the infamous surname to be arrested was Yusuf Kasab. Yusuf was arrested in the early 1990s and accused of committing blasphemy by proclaiming that he was a prophet. He was killed by a fellow inmate while awaiting trial in jail.
The second Kasab -- "another mad-faith-crank" -- was Sher Muhammad Kasab, who was recently arrested by the Pakistan Army during operations in Swat. Paracha described him as "a frontline butcher" of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. Sher Muhammad died shortly after he was captured, succumbing to injuries sustained in a gun battle with troops.
Paracha did not dismiss the surnames as a mere coincidence but saw a "meaningful concurrent".
"Because if one chronologically follows the exploits of all the Kasabs, he can draw a fairly interesting narrative about the madness of Islamic fanaticism that until recently had threatened to rip society and the country apart," he wrote.
"If delusions of grandeur like the one Yusuf Kasab seemed to have been suffering from is a madness, then the blasphemy accusation is the tool used by an opposing insanity to cure a madness they do not like the contents of," Paracha added.
The second Kasab, Sher Muhammad, was notorious for the number of beheadings and cold-blooded slaughter of dozens of Pakistani security men and infidels that he undertook. "Done in the name of religion, this, at best, can be defined as the extreme condition of the faith-based social psychosis that had been developing in the country for the last 30 years," Paracha wrote.
"He is beyond detoxification. He must be used to reign in similar mad men that, fortunately, are now on the run due to the army's and the government's recent operations in Swat and Waziristan."
According to Paracha, the third infamous Kasab, Ajmal, is perhaps the most vivid example of public displays of religiosity that has gripped Pakistan.
"Thus, it was rather natural for Ajmal to become a Jackie Chan for a holier cause: Islamic Jihad--But this one got caught," he wrote.
"There are still numerous Ajmal Kasabs frequenting mosques, madrassas and martial arts training schools in the Punjab, caught between what they see in action-packed Bollywood and Hollywood blockbusters and what they hear from crackpots that masquerade as imams, maulvis and 'scholars'," Paracha concluded.
