’12 bloodiest year for Shias in Pak

    There are guns ablaze and bombs aplenty across the border these days. The targets vary, but one fissure that goes back some decades is a particularly vile brand of sectarianism that pits Sunni against Shia across Pakistan’s terrain.
    The US-based, Human Rights Watch records 2012 as the bloodiest year for the Pakistani Shia community with over 400 targeted deaths; some 120 of these were in Balochistan. Commenting on the issue, HRW’s Pakistan specialist, Ali Dayan Hasan told Dawn, “As Shia community members continue to be slaughtered in cold blood, the callousness and indifference of authorities offer a damning indictment of the state, its military and security agencies.”
    Sectarianism is not new to Pakistan though strategies of attack have become increasingly brutal. However, some responsibility must fall on the average citizens of our complex polity. Though civil society groups are active in small constituencies, its not deep enough to create serious civil unrest.
    Sadly, over time, various forces in Pakistan have collaborated in the downfall of this rich and important tradition. Such a series of anti Shia atrocities reflect the sentiments of a larger public, much as Aung San Su Kyi’s deliberate silence on the mistreatment of the Rohingyas in Myanmar reflects the quiet assent of the country’s larger population.
    One tragic impact of the Shia-Sunni conflict is its influence on the average individual’s psyche, giving large space for the birth, rebirth and flowering of pitiful biases. I recall, a paranoid relative asking my mother if she was really going to send my sister and me to a majlis at a friends’ house. The frantic woman told us not to eat anything that was offered to us, especially the kheer, “You know they spit in their food and they serve it to you.”
    I couldn’t erase the image of my friends’ mother with a black dupatta on her head hovering over a pot of kheer and spitting her heart out, smiling evilly as she thought of her innocent Sunni guests gulping down mouthfuls.
    One other memory dates back to 1986, a verbal tug-ofwar in a sunless fourth grade classroom of a Karachi Convent school where allegiances were being struck along sectarian lines.
    The backdrop must have been some urban sectarian gun battle but the discussion evolved into segregation, along sectarian lines, in the classroom. Most of us were thoroughly uneducated on the finer points of dissent between Sunni and Shia communities; we were merely spreading Home Gospel. I do remember thinking that I was ashamed that ‘grownups’ could stoke such petty fires and impose them on us, their children.
    Many Pakistanis still don’t realize that the man they worship for creating their nation, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a Shia himself. One only has to know this to read the bloody events of our current times as a signal that the country has been hijacked by ideologues of a deranged politico-religious variety. But now, what do we do about that?
    The author is a New Delhibased Pakistani journalist