Daily Times

Pakistan’s living history is under threat from extremists, intent on wiping out diverse communities that have existed in the subcontinent for generations. The most recent manifestation of this genocidal tendency is deliberate targeting of the minority Sikh community in parts of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), who have come onto the radar of extremist militias. In the last one month there were three incidents of Sikh community members being targeted for murder by extremists in KP, the latest some days ago when a 30-year-old trader was shot outside his shop in Peshawar. On August 6, a 19-year-old Sikh man was killed and two traders were injured in a shooting, while a Sikh man was stabbed to death outside his shop in Mardan on September 3. The increase in attacks shows that far from being intimidated, sectarian militias are becoming bolder in targeting religious minority groups. Their net has widened to include Ahmedis, Shias, Hindus and now Sikhs and there seems to be no strategy in place to stop them. In fact it is questionable whether the government is even concerned that Pakistani citizens are being deliberately eliminated because of their religion. Religiously motivated violence has become the norm and there is no calculating how many lives it will engulf.

Is this a necessary facet of Pakistan’s ideological foundation, or have we moved towards this end with short-sighted and self-defeating choices? The answer is a little bit of both. Ironically, like Zionists in Israel who are accused of genocidal actions against Palestinians, Pakistani extremists have taken on the mantle of their past oppressors. Ostensibly created to prevent a minority Muslim community in India from being dominated by a Hindu majority, Pakistan has turned on its own religious minorities first by eschewing Jinnah’s secular vision for the country and then by empowering Islamic extremists in pursuit of strategic goals. For years the ruling elite suppressed Jinnah’s August 11, 1947 speech to the Constituent Assembly where he outlined his vision, for fear it would negate Pakistan’s incremental veering towards religious nationalism after independence. Arguably it was the Objectives Resolution in 1949 that opened the door for fundamentalists to interfere in the substance and structure of the new state, but successive governments failed to stop them from incrementally continue imposing their narrow vision and some even facilitated them. Former president Ayub Khan’s attempt to define an Islamic ‘ideology’ of Pakistan was the first step, though Islamic ‘brotherhood’ did not prevent genocide in East Pakistan. Under Ziaul Haq’s ‘Islamisation’ programme, religious extremists began to dominate the state. The results can now be seen before us in the daily murders among minority communities who are being forced to flee for their lives. By any standard this constitutes religious cleansing. Fanaticism is also beginning to create splits in the Sunni majority, with Salafis, Deobandis and Barelvis among other schools of thought emerging as violently competitive entities. There is no end to this process of exclusion; it is like a snake eating its own tail until finally there is nothing left. *