Attacks on minorities point to an identity crisis
The rising death toll from the suicide bombing of a Shia mosque in Pakistan's Sindh Province only adds to the list of thousands of Shias who have been slaughtered for their faith in that country. Saturday's attack, which has already claimed more than 60 lives, was the second major attack on Shias this year, after a similar bombing at a mosque in Rawalpindi on January 10 killed eight people. The killings don’t really shock anyone given Pakistan's bloody record against Shias, which includes blowing up markets and mosques frequented by Shias, dragging Shia commuters out of buses and shooting them in the head, and even targeted killings of high-profile Shia individuals.
Sectarian violence in Pakistan was seen even in the 1950s but it has become a defining feature since President Zia-ul Haq introduced his radicalisation programme in 1970s, subsuming just about every minority population in that country. The persecution of Shias only gained strength around the year 2000 but before that the Ahmadiyyas, the Hazaras and the Sufis were considered to be legitimate targets. Today, even some Sunni Muslim sects, such as the Barelvis, are considered apostates by the hardline Deobandis. The immediate issue here is religious extremism. The bloody campaign against religious minorities has been led by radical Islamic terror networks such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and is possibly the best example of what Frankenstein's monster looks like when it turns on its master. For decades, Pakistan has used these outfits to achieve its geo-political goals in the neighbourhood. And now the entire country is paying a heavy price for it.
But Pakistan's treatment of its minorities also points to a larger existential crisis. Even though it was conceived as a homeland for South Asian Muslims — who, it was argued in 1947, would not be safe in Hindu-majority India — there was never any clarity on what exactly that would mean in terms of Pakistani nationhood. This vagueness was the result of a variety of reasons, from the political (or electoral as Pakistan's religious and ethnic demographic in 1947 was much more diverse than today) to the coincidental (MA Jinnah died too soon after Pakistan's creation to hand-hold the state to maturity).
Anyway, the bottomline is that Pakistan was born with an identity crisis: Was it supposed to be a state for Muslims or a Muslim stateIJ And, who exactly was a MuslimIJ The Muslim community of the Indian sub-continent included people from different ethnic and linguistic traditions (one of the reasons why the erstwhile East Pakistan seceded) who also differed in their interpretation and practice of Islam. The Ahmadiyyas, for example, consider themselves to be Muslim, and so does the rest of the non-Sunni Muslim world. But in Pakistan, they are legally not part of the faith and, therefore, legitimate targets for persecution, not just in life but even in death, as the desecration of the tomb of the country's only Nobel laureate stands proof.