A RECENT report from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reiterates what we already know: sectarian violence in Pakistan has risen to unacceptable levels. The HRCP counts 687 killings in more than 200 sectarian attacks in 2013, up 22pc from 2012.
With each attack — targeted assassinations on busy street corners, mob violence in far-flung tehsils, massacres in Hazara ghettos, carnage in churches — we think we have seen the worst and that nothing more brutal can happen. And then it does.
It doesn’t help that religious divides are infinite — Shias, Deobandis, Barelvis, Ahl-i-Hadith, Hindus, Christians, Ahmadis, Ismailis. Everyone on social media loves quoting the line by Martin Niemöller, “and then they came for me”, but the true scale of the horror does not seem to have sunk in. As Pakistanis are shot in their neighbourhoods, murdered while at prayer, falsely accused of blasphemy and dug out of their graves, the country’s social fabric is being shredded.
Ismailimail 