Last week, protests erupted in Umerkot, a city located at the edge of the Thar Desert in Sindh. The protests were held to condemn the extrajudicial killing of a doctor who had been accused of committing blasphemy. The Sindh government confirmed that the accused was killed by the cops who had arrested him. His dead body was then snatched by some ‘fanatics’ and set on fire.
This horrific incident shocked a large number of ethnic Sindhis, who are in majority in Sindh outside the province’s multi-ethnic capital, Karachi. For over two decades now, Sindhi media and Sindhi scholars have been airing concerns about the ‘radicalisation’ of Sindhis.
However, the Sindhi-majority regions of Sindh have not witnessed as many incidents of ‘religiously motivated violence’, as have the country’s other provinces — especially Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). For example, according to a 2022 report, out of a total of 1,415 cases of blasphemy registered by the police between 1947 and 2021, 1,098 were in Punjab and just 173 in Sindh.
Even though there were even fewer such cases registered in KP and Balochistan, these two provinces (and Punjab) have witnessed far more incidents of sectarian violence and Islamist militancy than Sindh. However, Sindh’s ethnically diverse capital Karachi is somewhat of an exception. Its streets witnessed sectarian warfare in the early 1980s and then, from the mid-2000s, the city became a hub for various Islamist groups to raise money for their militant activities, through extortion, kidnappings, robberies, etc.
Incidents of violence and killings in the name of religion in Sindh are the remnants of a state-sponsored project that is no longer in play — but also indicate that secular forces need to secure social spaces they have abdicated to........