Daily Times Editorials 7th September 2026

Bigoted Policies

Pakistan’s Foreign Office has rightly condemned the demolition of a mosque in Saharanpur, describing it as part of an “Islamophobic and Hindutva-driven campaign to erase the Islamic heritage” of India. By Sunday, Muslim organisations inside India were openly questioning the “extraordinary haste” with which the operation was carried out, opposition politicians were demanding answers, and the mosque management was preparing to approach the Allahabad High Court. Uttar Pradesh’s administration had been quicker than all of them: bulldozers arrived early Saturday, barely three days after a district court dismissed the committee’s appeal.

The official case is straightforward enough. The mosque occupied 315 square metres inside the Collectorate complex, which revenue records identified as government property. Proceedings had been under way since March 2025, following a complaint by a former Bajrang Dal provincial functionary, and the city magistrate eventually ordered eviction. No place of worship enjoys immunity from a valid land law.

What makes Saharanpur harder to defend is the manner in which the state converted a legal finding into an irreversible fact. The September 2 judgment did not order demolition. Rather, it had dismissed the appeal and upheld the earlier eviction order. The mosque management also says it intended to seek relief from the higher court. Meanwhile, all five Collectorate gates were sealed, security forces were deployed, and a local politician alleges she was confined to her residence before she could travel to Saharanpur.South Asians & Diaspora

The irony became sharper when a brick-lined well roughly 20 feet deep was discovered beneath the debris, and officials summoned the Archaeological Survey of India to investigate its age.

Earlier in 2024, India’s Supreme Court was sufficiently troubled by arbitrary demolitions to lay down nationwide procedural safeguards and warn officials against assuming the roles of judge and executioner. Just last year, it had issued contempt notices to Uttar Pradesh officials over the partial demolition of Madni Masjid in Kushinagar.

Neither can the episode be separated from the political climate Narendra Modi and the BJP have cultivated over the past decade. PM Modi personally presided over the 2024 consecration of the Ram temple at Ayodhya, on the site where the Babri Masjid stood until its destruction in 1992–an act India’s own Supreme Court later called an “egregious violation of the rule of law.” His government subsequently pushed through sweeping changes to waqf administration, portions of which required Supreme Court intervention, while disputes involving Gyanvapi, Mathura and Sambhal continue to keep old mosques inside an increasingly charged political argument over history.

Even the BJP’s loss of its standalone parliamentary majority in 2024 appears to have done little to cool this majoritarian grammar. In Uttar Pradesh, where another state election approaches next year, the bulldozer has acquired a political symbolism far beyond municipal enforcement. That makes selective haste around Muslim religious sites particularly corrosive. *

Clarify the Threat

Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz has invited an avoidable controversy by saying that her province faces a greater security threat from neighbouring provinces than neighbouring countries. Read alongside her remarks about tri-border areas, checkpoints and militant movement, she appears to have been describing the routes through which terrorists reach Punjab. Her choice of words, however, has allowed an operational point to be read as something altogether larger: that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan themselves constitute the source of the threat.

The chief minister would do well to clarify the distinction, especially when Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, President Asif Ali Zardari and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar used their Defence Day messages to restate Pakistan’s position on externally supported terrorism. Dar specifically acknowledged the continuing sacrifices being made in KP and Balochistan. The numbers spell out the irony plain and simple. Pakistan suffered 699 terrorist attacks in 2025; KP endured 413 and Balochistan 254. Together, the two provinces accounted for more than 95 per cent of the national total and 1,000 of the country’s 1,034 terrorism-related deaths.Geographic Reference

It goes without saying that KP and Balochistan are absorbing the overwhelming share of a war whose front lines happen to run through their territory. Their policemen, soldiers and civilians have filled graveyards while terrorist networks exploit difficult terrain and interprovincial corridors to reach targets elsewhere. Indeed, Field Marshal Asim Munir was in Quetta this weekend reiterating that Balochistan’s peace, prosperity and people remain central to the state’s efforts, only hours after security forces reported killing 48 terrorists across the province in 72 hours.

On Sunday, 25 terrorists had been killed in one prolonged attempt to infiltrate North Waziristan from Afghanistan, while another seven were eliminated in a separate border encounter. The latest UN monitoring assessment has reported continuing Taliban support for the TTP, which retains thousands of fighters inside Afghanistan. Islamabad has also repeatedly alleged, and says it has evidence of, Indian sponsorship and facilitation of militant groups targeting Pakistan.

Pakistan’s counterterrorism challenge therefore runs through a chain of sanctuary, facilitation, border infiltration, internal transit and local logistics. The last provincial boundary crossed by an attacker cannot sensibly be mistaken for the beginning of that chain.

The irony is that CM Nawaz has reflected an administration taking this architecture seriously. Punjab has invested in thermal cameras, drones, fortified checkpoints, intelligence integration and joint operations with the military and neighbouring administrations.

But words spoken by a sitting chief minister do not remain inside a Lahore auditorium. Within hours, Indian outlets were portraying the remark as an admission that Pakistan’s case against India and Afghanistan had collapsed, while Afghan media highlighted the apparent contradiction. That interpretation is self-serving, yet propagandists require ambiguity far more than accuracy.

A brief clarification should suffice. Security policy is difficult enough without giving hostile information networks a sentence they could hardly have written better themselves. *