THE call by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to seriously tackle the new wave of xenophobia, racism and intolerance, witnessed recently in Europe and the US, has a special relevance to Pakistan as the threat to this country from the vigilante brigade is assuming new dimensions.

Vigilante action was relatively unknown in Pakistan until Gen Ziaul Haq decided to empower state functionaries to force Muslim citizens to perform their religious rituals. The scheme died with him. The effort by the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal to revive it in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa through a hisba law was scotched by the judiciary. However, the ultra-conservative extremists discovered the possibilities of vigilante action while promoting the enforcement of Gen Zia’s additions to the Penal Code list of offences relating to religion.

They began by reporting to the police what they claimed to be offences under Sections 295 to 298 of the PPC. Since those charged under these sections faced greater hazards than the accused booked under any other law (until anti-terrorism laws became the most dreaded measures), these provisions began to be invoked for settling personal scores or to deprive one’s rivals of their property or business advantage.

Thus, vigilante action took two forms. One, complaints were filed with the police for action under the provisions mentioned above, all of which were quite wrongly given the label of the blasphemy law. Secondly, courts began to be gheraoed by highly charged crowds when such cases were heard. While most of these cases in the beginning were against non-Muslim citizens, the logic of the discriminatory laws and the possibilities of their abuse resulted in the targeting of Muslims too, from social scientist Akhtar Hamid Khan to political leaders including Benazir Bhutto. Now these laws are also used as weapons in intra-Muslim sectarian conflicts. Today, more Muslims, including prayer leaders, are facing blasphemy charges than non-Muslims.

Many people suspect that the zealots are commanded by someone in authority.

Until recently, the vigilante groups had concentrated on persecuting the members of the Ahmadi community and the Hazaras of Quetta. Professional Ahmadi-baiters soon entered the field. At one time, a majority of complaints against Ahmadis in Sindh were filed by a single preacher in a town near Hyderabad. The offences varied from writing ‘Bismillah’ in a private letter to preaching the Ahmadi faith. These complaints ended when the complainant was promoted and posted in a bigger city.

In Punjab too, several professionals won distinction for targeting Ahmadis who were merely delivering their monthly paper, duly registered, to subscribers, or who had made the mistake of buying a goat in the days preceding Eidul Azha. The latter were accused of planning to offer a sacrifice on Eid. In one case, the police not only hauled up an Ahmadi for slaughtering a lamb, but also used the mutton recovered from his house as case property. One of the biggest feats of the anti-Ahmadi vigilante group was frightening the chief election commissioner in 2002 into registering the Ahmadis on a separate list while other voters were being put on a single electoral roll regardless of their belief.

These were relatively underdeveloped vigilantes as compared to their more recent incarnations, some of whom have taken to liquidating their victims themselves while some others hold rallies against anyone expressing views the establishment does not like.

One such group surfaced after five bloggers disappeared involuntarily and the police received a complaint of blasphemy allegedly committed by them. Rallies were held by mobs in Lahore and several other places, calling for the deaths of the ‘missing persons’. The manoeuvre was apparently too crude to be swallowed by the interior minister, who dismissed all speculation as premature.

Nobody stopped these vigilante groups. Instead, the police blocked roads to ensure the traffic did not disturb them. This perhaps emboldened the vigilante brigade to target two journalists who are also prominent TV figures. One of them is accused of crossing the red line drawn by the doyens of religiosity, and the other for daring to ask some questions about the establishment’s privileges. Rallies have been held by young men, who look like students, to demand putting the two journalists on the rack.

Many people suspect that these zealots are commanded by someone in authority. This impression receives support from the fact that these agitators have never taken up a public grievance — from unannounced stoppage of electricity or gas supplies, to the rape of five-year-old girls, to the sale of substandard stents — and they viciously attack citizens who are guilty only of expressing dissent, which is their constitutional right. One hopes this impression about any official patronage of vigilantism is wrong and will be dispelled by appropriate government action to neutralise it.

But mischief has already been done. Through issuing threats on phone or instigation of violence against their targets, the vigilante groups are creating a climate of all-pervasive fear. The people will be under pressure not only to give up their right to freedom of expression but also to stop thinking or reflecting on their condition. There will be no discourse worth the name, and society will be reduced to a horde of morons.

The government has traditionally hesitated from proceeding against vigilante groups because they use a religious cover. There is nothing religious about their objectives or their conduct. The whole thing is political. One proof of this is their aversion to any scholarly debate on their heresy and forcing of ulema who disagree with them into exile or retirement at home. What the government must realise is that the visible targets of vigilante action are pawns in a game in which the real target is the state and the system that it swears by. While the vigilante brigade is a threat to individual victims, it is a menace to the state. The harm it could do is incalculable.

Published in Dawn February 2nd, 2017