Almost 77 years to the day Pakistan was founded with a vision of a religiously tolerant society, the country still grapples with the evil of religious violence. A recent incident in Sargodha exemplifies this ongoing challenge. A Christian man faced violence from a mob of religious people who attempted to lynch him upon accusations of desecrating religious scriptures.
The charged mob attempted to break into the man’s house, carrying sticks and weapons. The unfortunate event reminds one of the Jaranwala rampage where numerous churches were torched, houses demolished, and copies of the Holy Bible desecrated because of alleged blasphemy by two members of the Christian community. It is also an eerie reminder of the 2009 Gojra riots, the 2013 Joseph Colony incident and the lynching of a Sri Lankan factory manager, Priyantha Diyawadanage, in Sialkot in 2022 on mere accusations of blasphemy.
The fact that it is the third consecutive large-scale event in the last 3 years underscores a worrying trend of mob violence in Pakistan. No sovereign state permits its citizens to take the law into their own hands. While the allegations of blasphemy may be true, no sovereign state permits its citizens to take the law into their own hands.
However, in the absence of the rule of law, vigilantism increases. Unfortunately, in Pakistan, it often requires a lot of pressure from human rights organizations, public protests, and social media campaigns to hold the perpetrators of violence accountable. R.
