Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The police had first tried to reason with the angry mob. Failing that, the police lobbed tear gas at the crowd and began ushering Nazir Masih Gill and his family to safety. But according to the police, the 74-year-old Gill became confused and went the other direction.
By the time they found him again, the mob had already beaten him senseless; his home and that of his son’s had also been looted and burned, as was his shoe store. He would die in hospital just days later.
This tragedy unfolded in late May, in a Christian community in Sargodha, a city in Pakistan’s Punjab province. But it was eerily reminiscent of a mob attack on another Christian community nearly a year earlier, in Jaranwala city, also in Punjab, where houses, churches, and chapels were looted and then burned down. The only reason no one was killed there was because residents had been forewarned and were able to escape beforehand.
The trigger in both cases was an allegation that someone in the community had burned pages of the Quran. In both Sargodha and Jaranwala, the allegation was announced via a nearby mosque’s loudspeaker, and members of a far-right Islamic political party led the mob in righteous rage to seek out the alleged offender with the intention to do harm.
Rights advocates say that predominantly Muslim Pakistan’s increasingly stringent blasphemy laws are mainly to blame for the rising number of mob attacks on suspected blasphemers in recent years. But they also say that the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) and its provocative rhetoric against non-Muslims have added considerable fuel to what had been a slow-burning fire and turned it into a raging blaze.
Indeed, just days after Gill died of his injuries, TLP held a rally in Sargodha, protesting the continued detention of the dozens who had been arrested for his lynching and the attack on his home and store.
A local Christian publication quoted TLP Sargodha leader Muhammad Naeem Chattha Qadri as pronouncing to the 2,500 or so rallyists: “Tell me if we were wrong in killing that Chuhra (a derogatory term for Christians) who burned the Quran. We will never compromise on the sanctity and respect of the Quran, and whoever commits blasphemy will meet the same fate.”
A martyr to ‘emulate’
TLP began as a movement in 2015 to demand the release of Mumtaz Qadri, an elite commando who, four years earlier, had assassinated Punjab Governor Salman Taseer for speaking in support of Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of two who had been accused of blasphemy; Taseer was also a known liberal who had criticized Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.
Mumtaz Qadri was eventually handed the death sentence and hanged in February 2016. At his funeral, the movement announced its evolution into the political party TLP. Mumtaz is considered a martyr by the TLP, whose top leaders have frequently praised him in their public addresses and encouraged others to emulate his actions.
TLP sees itself as a protector of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, and has adopted “Death to blasphemers!” as its rallying cry. Co-founded by the late cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi, TLP has a wide network of mosque support, as well as strong social-media presence. These factors have helped it build up even wider support, which has enabled it to gather followers and mount massive rallies – as well as, many say, vicious mob attacks.
TLP even managed to win a couple of seats in parliament in the 2018 elections, but was unable to repeat that performance in the most recent polls. Nevertheless, it is still able to drag the government to the negotiating table with its massive demonstrations.
Just this July, it had the government calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “terrorist” and forming a committee to oversee a boycott of Israeli goods in exchange for TLP ending a weeks-long sit-in in a major thoroughfare in Rawalpindi.
But it is TLP’s calls for action against blasphemers and their perceived supporters that have had observers and rights advocates worried. Primarily, this is because such calls are taking place in times when false accusations have become rife, with many supposed blasphemy cases later revealed to have been rooted in political machinations or personal grudges.
In far too many cases, too, the accused do not even get to have their side heard in court, but instead become victims of extrajudicial killings.
In Sargodha, for example, a fact-finding mission by the non-profit Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) found that a dispute between Gill’s family and that of a neighbor may have prompted the blasphemy allegation against the Gill patriarch. In 2021, a mob lynched and burned Sri Lankan factory supervisor Priyantha Kumara in Sialkot, again in Punjab, because he was said to have committed blasphemy. It was later reported that the accusation had come from workers upset over his disciplining them.
In a more recent case, a young woman nearly lost her life to a bloodthirsty mob because of a misunderstanding of another kind. The woman and her companion were out shopping one day last March when a man exclaimed loudly that her blouse had Quranic verses on it and she was therefore committing blasphemy.
Fortunately, shopkeepers were able to keep her safe until the police came and escorted her to the police station. There it was revealed that the Arabic writing on her blouse translated to “beautiful.”
Mob as judge and executioner
That a policewoman stood her ground and protected the woman from an angry mob is said to have galvanized other police officers to do the same in similar situations. This was why many say police managed to save at least the rest of Gill’s family from the violent crowd in Sargodha.
But the police can do only so much.
Last June, just two weeks after Gill’s demise, a mob dragged a local tourist from a police station in Madyan, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and killed him. The police had ostensibly been questioning the man after someone lodged a blasphemy complaint against him.
According to the BBC, the regional police chief later “accused the local mosque of encouraging people to gather after the police had first rescued the man.” The police rounded up more than 30 people in connection with the incident. In response, local TLP leaders held a press conference in which they demanded the release of those who were “innocent” and blamed the police for the whole debacle.
A report by The Dawn newspaper said that at the press conference, the party’s local leaders justified the mob killing as “a result of public anger and reaction” as police had failed to lodge a first information report against the tourist.
“They argued that no blasphemer was sentenced in Pakistan’s 70-year history,” said The Dawn report. “They alleged that blasphemy law could not be implemented properly … as rulers were afraid of foreign countries…. They claimed that if the judiciary and administration had followed the blasphemy law and punished the culprits, people would not have taken the law into their hands.”
In an interview with ADC, TLP’s Lahore Emir Usman Manzoor Naqshbandi also pointed out that while no one has been executed for blasphemy in Pakistan, many people have been convicted of this crime, the maximum punishment for which under the law is death.
In a December 2023 brief on blasphemy in Pakistan, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), citing mostly official Pakistani data, said that 215 individuals were arrested that year for blasphemy, most of them in Sindh and Punjab provinces.
USCIRF added that in Punjab alone, “551 individuals were imprisoned for blasphemy, including 506 adults under trial and 45 convicted, as of November 2023. Of those imprisoned, an estimated 40 individuals are on death row.”
The minority rights group Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), meanwhile, said that between 1994 and 2023, at least 95 people accused of blasphemy were extrajudicially killed. The figure included seven who were murdered in 2023 alone. Data from the Lahore-based CSJ also showed that since 1987, nearly 2,500 individuals have faced charges of blasphemy.
Cowering courts?
“I think it has become very easy for anyone to accuse anyone of blasphemy in Pakistan because these kinds of issues get a lot of hype,” commented former TV news anchor Awais Iqbal who is now based in the United States. “These incidents get viral on social media in no time. One becomes the center of attention. If you want to settle a score, then you can accuse someone of blasphemy.”
TLP’s Naqshbandi, though, denied his party’s involvement in any blasphemy-related mob attacks, including those that led to the killing of the targets. In fact, he said, TLP had even helped local authorities in such situations.
Of the August 2023 incident in Jaranwala, Naqshbandi said that his party had offered support to the Christian community. But he said that he was surprised at what he perceived as disproportionate state support for the Christian victims.
“We visited the area and assisted in the community’s return,” Naqshbandi told ADC. “While we were saddened by the sight of burned churches, we question why there was no comparable outcry or acknowledgment regarding the alleged destruction of Quranic texts.”
Rights advocates and observers, however, say that TLP’s clout cannot be underestimated or ignored.
Human rights lawyer Yasser Latif Hamdani even told ADC that TLP is implementing a “well-planned strategy against religious minorities, especially the Ahmadi community,” through what he described as misuse of blasphemy laws and the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act.
He also said that TLP has managed to intimidate lawyers and lower-court judges who handle blasphemy cases. As a result, even those with the flimsiest of presented evidence results in convictions, which are later overturned by higher courts.
“TLP uses mob pressure on judges,” Hamdani said. “Many lawyers avoid blasphemy cases out of fear of TLP. While higher judiciary might withstand the pressure, judges at district and lower court levels are often intimidated by TLP, especially in cases involving blasphemy allegations or minority communities, particularly Ahmedis.”
Iqbal, for his part, indicated that disempowered people tend to join mob attacks so that they could feel, even just for once, how it is to be the one in control. The erstwhile activist added that economic deprivation contributes to such incidents.
“I think the government needs to end economic disparities in Pakistan to minimize these issues,” he said. “If people have better economic conditions, they will not get involved in issues like these.” ◉