Mob lynchings in India and Pakistan

Seventy-seven years after independence, the two countries continue to vie with each other over the savagery of their treatment of religious minorities,

Twenty-three-year-old Salman Vohra had been married just three months. His relatives had planned a celebratory dinner on June 22 for him and his wife, Mashira, 20, who was newly pregnant. But first, Salman, a fervent fan in cricket-obsessed India, joined a group of his friends at a local tournament in the village of Chikhodra in Gujarat state.

Several of the players were Muslim, as was Salman. In this heavily Hindu province, he did nothing to hide his religion: He wore a skullcap, a long white tunic and flowing pants. During the tournament, the Muslim players performed well, which angered some Hindus in the audience, which eventually grew to about 5,000.

As the final match began, a dispute broke out in the parking lot. Salman’s uncle Yasin Vohra told me a mob started chanting “Jai Shri Ram” — “Victory to Lord Ram” — a phrase that has become a rallying cry for Hindu nationalists. His uncle showed me a grainy video that went viral on the internet. You can see the crowd closing in and hear someone screaming for help and others shouting, “Hit him, hit him hard!”

A grainy video of the attack on Salman Vohra

Photograph of Salman Vohra shared by his family

Salman died from the beating and a knife wound to his kidney. At least 10 men have been arrested in connection with his slaying.

Two days earlier and 800 miles away in Pakistan, Mohammad Ismail, 40, from eastern Pakistan, was visiting Madyan, a popular tourist destination in the Swat Valley known for its tranquil beauty and scenic mountains. News stories reported that someone claimed to have seen burned pages of the Quran in Ismail’s hotel room, rumors that were then amplified by announcements from mosques around the city. Never mind that Ismail was Muslim.

The police detained him for questioning on suspicion of blasphemy. He denied the charges. Islamist radicals forced their way into the police station, setting it and several police cars on fire, and the police fled. In a video on Whatsapp, a mob is seen beating and kicking him before setting him on fire. As he begs for mercy, the mob continues to kick him.

People streamed the assault on Facebook Live and other social media platforms. Ismail died inside the Madyan police station. Thirty people have been arrested in the case, including children as young as 13.

I viewed both of these videos. They were so disturbing that I could watch only in short bursts. These horrific incidents demonstrate yet again that the religious fault lines that led to the partition of India 77 years ago still constitute a powerful force.

In August 1947, after roughly 200 years of colonial rule, the British left India, partitioning the subcontinent into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. The land where Hindus and Muslims had once coexisted and fought together for freedom descended into one of the worst sectarian bloodbaths in history. Both communities experienced extreme violence: Women were raped and mutilated, men and children were slaughtered by Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other. 

About 15 million people were displaced, roughly 1 million were killed, and one of the largest mass migrations in human history took place as people moved to either side of the new borders, leaving deep scars of hatred. Fleeing families were massacred by the thousands.

Why did a population of Hindus and Muslims who had fought together for independence turn on each other so violently? The transformation was driven by the British “divide and rule” strategy, which pitted one religion against the other. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of All-India Muslim League and an archrival of Mohandas K. Gandhi, sought a separate homeland for Muslims rather than allow them to be a minority of about 25 percent. “We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India,” he said.

The Indian National Congress party was the primary vehicle for the Indian independence movement, but its secular approach clashed with Hindu-nationalist ideology. The partition further fueled these sentiments. Saadat Hasan Manto, a revered chronicler of the shared history of India and Pakistan, wrote that the calamity of Partition was not that India had been divided into two countries but that “human beings in both countries were slaves, slaves of bigotry … slaves of religious passions, slaves of animal instincts and barbarity.”

The advent of social media has only magnified the divide. Posts in India and Pakistan speak disparagingly of the lynchings in the neighboring country but remain circumspect about the ones that take place on their own soil.

When Pakistani nationals watch the horrific videos emerging from India, they often write that Jinnah was right to insist on an Islamic republic. They point out that Muslims who chose to stay in India after Partition are treated as second-class citizens.

Yet as the murder of Mohammad Ismail shows, even Muslims are not safe in a country where blasphemy is punishable by death or life imprisonment. Not to mention minorities who — in Pakistan, just as in India — often fall victim to mob violence. The latest example: A Christian man in his 70s died in June after he was attacked by a mob in Sargodha, a city in northeastern Pakistan that is 95 percent Muslim. Nazir Masih, whose family owned a shoe business there, was set upon on May 25 after an uncorroborated report that he had burned pages of the Quran. His family says he was burning trash.

A mob formed outside Masih’s place of business, as well as his home two blocks away. They set fire to the business, destroyed his home and attacked him with bricks, sticks, stones and steel rods. They also vandalized the homes of other Christian families, who fled. Police charged 44 identified suspects, plus hundreds of unidentified suspects, with terrorism; they also levied a blasphemy charge against Masih, who died of his injuries in a hospital a week later.

According to a report by a local foundation that investigated the incident, Masih’s grandsons had gotten into a dispute with a Muslim neighbor three days before the incident. A nephew told investigators that some neighbors resented the success of the shoe business.

“False accusations of blasphemy continue to be on the rise in Pakistan, leading to targeted mob violence; crowds are provoked on religious sentiments to settle personal scores and dispense mob justice,” the report read. “Unfortunately, in Pakistan when it comes to blasphemy accusations anyone is free to act as a prosecutor, judge and executor.”

So great is the fear of taking a stand against the blasphemy law in Pakistan that judges sometimes recuse themselves from hearing cases. In 2011, the governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was killed by his own bodyguard for criticizing the blasphemy law.

Commentators in India express shock about the actions of mobs in Pakistan but have few words of outrage when lynching rampages take place in India, as they did after the recent general elections. Maktoob Media, an independent publication that reports on the marginalized, has listed 12 mob lynchings in the eight weeks since the June 4 election results.

Most disturbing is the way these brutal killings have become normalized.

When a mob lynched a Muslim man in India in 2015, a year after Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi became the prime minister, the attack made national headlines. Prime-time TV shows and lead editorials in newspapers asked, How could this happen in a democracy like India? Social media posts expressed shock and anger. Editorials were churned out about religious fundamentalism and bigotry.

Nine years later, mob lynchings barely make a ripple.

Because the victims are reduced to mere ciphers in news coverage of these incidents, I called their relatives to get a sense of the lives lost.

In the state of Uttar Pradesh in the north, I reached the brother of a Muslim man who was killed along with two others on June 7 while they were transporting cattle. The suspects said they were chasing the men to “protect the cows,” holy animals in Hinduism. Attempted murder charges were dropped, and investigators said the victims had instead jumped to their deaths. The man told me his brother, Saddam Qureshi, 23, had never gone to school and had been working from the age of 14. “I know we will never get justice,” his brother said. “Tell me what is illegal in the country — transporting cattle or being a Muslim or both? Or just being a Muslim and a poor man in this country whose life has no meaning?”

In the same state, a mob lynched a Muslim man named Aurangzeb on June 18 as he was on his way home from selling bread. After police arrested four men in the case, protests broke out. Days later, a Hindu woman claimed her home had been robbed and that locals had identified Aurangzeb as one of the thieves. His injuries, she alleged, came when he fell down stairs trying to escape. Eleven days after his death, authorities charged him with banditry. I called Aurangzeb’s sister. “What is the point of this, there will be no justice. We are living in trauma, just let us be,” she said before hanging up.

Also in Uttar Pradesh, where another Muslim man, Firoz Qureshi, was allegedly lynched in July, authorities filed a criminal case against journalists who reported the incident, charging them with “promoting enmity.” Police said the man had been beaten up by a few men when he entered their home and the killing was not a mob lynching. The man’s family told a different story. “It seems it’s a crime in Modi’s India to report a crime,” said journalist and author Ziya Us Salam.

As for Salman Vohra, the newlywed killed at the cricket match, his uncle Yasin said Salman loved working out at the gym and was a fan of Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan. He added that the family had encouraged Salman and his brothers to move to Canada, where other relatives have settled, because of the anti-Muslim mind-set that has overtaken Gujarat in recent years. “But Salman wanted to be close to his soil, his Gujarat, his friends.” 

What, if anything, will stop the rash of killings? In both India and Pakistan, the men in power are inflaming religious hatred rather than tamping it down: In the recent national elections, Modi regularly incited his followers in India with harsh criticisms of Muslims, whom he called “infiltrators.” And in Pakistan, last year the government broadened the blasphemy law, even though false charges have reportedly resulted in many deaths.

Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Asif, addressed the National Assembly on the topic in June, saying the country had failed to protect its citizens. “Minorities are being murdered daily … no religious minority is safe in Pakistan. Even the smaller sects of the Muslims are not safe,” he said. He acknowledged that in cases of alleged blasphemy, people were exploiting religious sentiments for personal disputes. The National Assembly passed a resolution condemning lynchings but no law to enforce it.

And in India in July, a judge castigated the Delhi police for failing to act against officials who were involved in the lynching of a Muslim man in January 2020. “Mob vigilantism and mob violence do not cease to be so merely because these are perpetrated, not by ordinary citizens, but by policemen themselves,” he wrote. “If anything, the element of abomination gets aggravated if a hate crime is committed by persons in uniform.”

I asked Nadeem Khan, founder of India’s Association for Protection of Civil Rights, whether he saw any hope on the horizon. “You can have all the laws and rules against mob lynching,” he said, “but when you are dealing with an anti-Muslim regime that has systematically abdicated its responsibility towards the marginalized, there can be little justice in sight.”

Sowing hatred against “the other” is a powerful political tool used by autocrats worldwide. With a lack of political will to counter that force, humanity will continue to be a casualty in these two nations with a shared history and culture.

This piece was first published in the Washington Post in August 2024

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