Terror of nature, nurture in Pakistan

Pakistan seems to be in a ‘calamity warp’ of sort, intensely feeling the heat from both nature as well as the fallouts of its radical ideological fringes that are eating it away from within. With the earthquake on Tuesday, measuring 7.7 on Richter scale and killing over 230 people, coming barely two days after the heinous Peshawar church bombing that claimed at least 82 lives, of mostly Christians, it appears that our western neighbour is not only plagued by the problems of terrorism, much of which is the byproduct of its misguided internal and external policies, but is also being harrowed by the very forces of nature that look as if they are unhappy with the land.

Pakistan sits right in the centre of a major tremor-prone region comprising much of Southwest Asia and Tuesday’s quake once again reminded us all that the country needs to seriously scale up its disaster preparedness to handle such incidents in future. However, much like India, Pakistan’s disaster management remains as abysmal as its grip on terrorism, and this is where it should really focus on. Instead of waging unnecessary wars against each other, India and Pakistan should join hands in tackling the similar issues staring them in the face and take lessons from the similar troubled times that both are going through at present.