Islamabad looks helpless on sectarian violence
The lahore church bombings on Sunday show that either Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his Government do not have the political will or they are simply incapable of containing the sectarian violence that has ripped the country apart. The bottom line is that the minorities in Pakistan continue to be extremely vulnerable while the state does precious little to protect them from religious extremists. Sunday's attack in lahore, the capital of the relatively prosperous Punjab Province, has garnered global attention primarily because it shatters, yet again, the myth of Punjab being some sort of an oasis of peace in Pakistan's otherwise violent space.
Punjab is the home turf of the Prime Minister — his brother Shahbaz Sharif is the Chief Minister — and there has been a perception that the Sharifs (and Pakistan's elite in general) know how to keep their backyard safe. However, as Sunday's attacks show, Pakistan's minorities are not safe anywhere — not in lahore or even in Islamabad (another supposed patch of peace). In March 2013, there was a similar attack on a Christian neighbourhood in lahore wherein more than 100 Christian homes were razed to the ground after a member of that community was alleged to have made blasphemous remarks.
Months later, in September, there was a suicide attack at the historic All Saints Church in Peshawar that killed 75. Forget about ordinary Pakistani Christians, even serving Christian political leaders have not been spared, as the March 2011 assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti, then the Federal Minister for Minority Affairs and the only Christian Member of Parliament, stands proof. Bhatti was killed for speaking out against Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws; that Salman Taseer, the powerful Governor of Punjab, had also been assassinated for the same reason only months earlier, goes to show the extent of the problem.
like the Christians, Pakistan's Hindus and even its minority Muslim sects such as the Ahmadiyyas and the Shias have received a raw deal. Compared to 1947, when Christians, Hindus and Sikhs formed 23 per cent of the population, non-Muslims today are down to less than three per cent. Ahmadiyya Muslims have also been a consistent target over the years (so much so that the grave of Pakistan's only Nobel laureate was desecrated because he was an Ahmadiyya) while Shia Muslims have been added to the list more recently by Sunni terror networks such as the Taliban and its affiliated groups. In fact, this year has seen a definite uptick in anti-Shia attacks as well.
In January, at least 53 people were killed in a bomb blast in the Shia-majority town of Shikarpur in Sindh; less than a fortnight later, Taliban stormed a Shiite mosque in Peshawar and killed 19. This list will grow and civilians will continue to die as long as the Government does not adopt a zero-tolerance policy towards terror. As of now, it only condemns terror attacks and occasionally goes after some groups but has no qualms in doing business with others who are committed to the same poisonous ideology. For example, many of the anti-Shia attacks have been launched by the lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a proscribed organisation, but that has not stopped the Sharif Government from striking deals with the leJ's political arm.