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Sialkot Lynching: Intolerance Rising

Asanga Abeyagoonasekera

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) report puts Pakistan on top of the list of the world’s worst violators of religious freedom. That’s no surprise, given the most recent incident that saw the brutal manner in which a Sri Lankan garment factory manager in Sialkot, Pakistan was beaten to pulp, his limp body lynched and then burnt by a mob in a town, that is ironically, a byword for sporting goods. The brutal act was immediately condemned by Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, who tweeted: ‘The horrific vigilante attack on factory in Sialkot & the burning alive of Sri Lankan manager is a day of shame for Pakistan. I am overseeing the investigations & let there be no mistake all those responsible will be punished with full severity of the law. Arrests are in progress’.

Too late? According to a reputed media outlet, the incident had a direct co-relation to the changing political stance of the Imran Khan government to the ‘hardline Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP)’ who are seen as behind the attack on the victim, Priyantha Kumara Diyawadana. He ‘allegedly tore a poster of the hardline group in which Quranic verses were inscribed and threw it in the dustbin. The poster of the Islamist party was pasted on the wall adjoining the 49 year old’s office. A couple of factory workers saw him removing the poster and spread the word’, setting off the mob fury, reports said.

Prime Minister Khan had only days before, made a complete U-turn on the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) which is headquartered in his home province of KhyberPakhtunkhwa. In April, the Pakistan government had moved to ban the TLP under anti-terrorism legislation, taking its leader Saad Rizvi into custody, setting off huge protests. In November, the same cabinet revoked the declaration of the TLP as a banned group, and a provincial government moved to remove Rizvi’s name from an anti-terrorism watchlist. While the entire government is not in favour of this decision, Minister Fawad Chaudhry cautioned “neither the Pakistani government nor the state is completely ready to fight extremism … the way the state had to back off in the TLP’s case, symbolises that the bomb (of extremism) is ticking”.

While the TLP may say it has no role in spreading extremism even as Pakistan authorities quibble over the subject, the recent lynching of the Sri Lankan reinforces growing concerns of uncontrolled, rising extremism, and its potential to inflame mob fury across the unmonitored borderlands with western neighbour Afghanistan and the Central Asian states and spill over to the entire South Asian region. The ban on TLP was foreseen as an unfruitful exercise by Pakistan scholar and former Ambassador to the U.S. Hussain Haqqani saying, “it is unlikely that banning one group (TLP) will diminish Pakistan’s religious extremism problem.” The problem is ‘While Pakistan’s establishment has alternated between various Islamist factions, mainstreaming one while suppressing another, it has never thought about mainstreaming secularists who have been dubbed as traitors or unfaithful to the ideology of Pakistan’. The assassination of Salman Taseer, former Governor of Panjab, killed by his bodyguard for speaking against the blasphemy law where the killer was garlanded with flowers by lawyers, reflects the real perception of Pakistan on blasphemy. TLP has in no small measure influenced not just domestic but Pakistan foreign policy as well, more so under the environment created by PM Khan’s government which fuels the terror trajectory. French President Emanuel Macron was targeted when he was accused by TLP and the Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan for spreading Islamophobia. The recent summoning of France’s ambassador is an incident of deep polarisation of policymakers on extremism. President Macron explains, “The problem is an ideology which claims its own laws should be superior to those of the Republic,” while purportedly continues to defend the laws of freedom of expression. This binary sees PM Khan slamming Macron, who he says “has chosen to encourage Islamophobia by attacking Islam rather than the terrorists who carry out violence” buttressed further by Turkish President Reccip Tayyep Erdogan, self-styled leader of the non-Saudi Islamist countries, who joins PM Khan in criticising the French President.

The issue of blasphemy and rising extremism has gone beyond borders. In September, a Pakistani man was taken into custody by French police for allegedly attacking and seriously wounding two people with a meat cleaver in Paris over the issue of blasphemy. While individual cases such as in Paris or the murder of the Sri Lankan in Pakistan are just one side of the story, the Pakistan government and their military ha