Vigilante violence by religious fanatics is becoming a subcontinental problem. Even as gau rakshaks (cow protectors) are running amok under the benign watch of BJP governments at the Centre and in several states, Islamic fanatics are running wild in Pakistan next door.
On April 13 Mashal Khan, a journalism student at Abdul Wali Khan University in Mardan, a dusty town in north-west Pakistan, was pulled from a room by a crowd of fellow students. The violence that followed, partially recorded on a mobile phone, was staggeringly brutal. The attackers shot him twice, dragged his corpse through hallways, beat it with planks and stripped it naked.
Earlier in the day, a fellow journalism student had accused Khan of blasphemy. That allegation appears to have triggered the attack. The penalty for blasphemy under Pakistan law is death. But it’s increasingly common that vigilantes take the law into their own hands before courts get involved.
Since 1990 at least 65 people have been murdered by mobs for allegedly insulting Islam. As often in such cases, there was no evidence against Khan, apart from the claims of the classmate who denounced him, Wajahat, a disgruntled young man with a fondness for the blood-curdling rhetoric of Islamist televangelists.
Khan’s murder was the first mob blasphemy killing in the country’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. It was also the first blasphemy killing at a university. Before this, the most horrific such attack had involved villagers who burned a Christian couple in a brick kiln in 2014. That well-off and literate young men have perpetrated Khan’s murder troubles many Pakistanis. Dawn, a liberal newspaper, lamented that a “cancer” afflicting Pakistan had even reached a place where “minds are supposed to be enlightened”.
Allegations of blasphemy are often made by those with other grievances against the accused: the charge can be used as an excuse to knock off a business rival or someone who causes the accuser trouble. Three days prior to Khan’s death, he had alleged that some members of the university’s staff were corrupt. Several of them, who have links with the Awami National Party, a secular Pushtun group which controls the university, have been arrested in connection with Khan’s death.