The History Behind the Murder of a Pakistani Christian Couple

On Nov. 6, a Christian couple in Punjab’s Kot Radha Krishan, Shama and Shahzad Masih, were accused of blasphemy. When they got wind that a frenzied mob was approaching, they locked their doors, but to no avail. Their perpetrators, numbered in the thousands, dragged the couple outside, beat them to death, and cruelly burned their bodies in a brick kiln. The murders have once again sparked international debate about Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, and brought back into focus the chronic issues of religious extremism and militancy in the country. However, it is worth considering that while Pakistan’s most influential militant organization, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, has brazenly targeted religious minorities in the past, this specific act of violence was conducted by a mob imposing vigilante justice — and evidence of such religiously provoked conflicts can be found in the subcontinent as early as 1857, if not even earlier.

Vigilante justice surrounding blasphemy is common in Pakistan, a country where the laws, courts, and police ignore and even facilitate such retribution. Between 1990 and 2012, out of the 59 blasphemy-related deaths in Pakistan, 43 were extrajudicial. Once someone is accused of blasphemy, the first threat they face is the one Shama and Shahzad faced — being lynched by a faceless mob. Often times local leaders are able to restrain rioters and the suspects are handed to the police, but with blasphemy, there is always the danger that some misguided policeman, a self-appointed custodian of Islam waiting outside a courtroom, or even an overzealous prison inmate will kill an alleged blasphemer, and in their defense, simply state that they were merely upholding the blasphemy law proscribed by the state.

The current blasphemy laws take root in sections 295, 296, and 298 of the Indian Penal Code, which were reactionary laws promulgated in 1860 to deter religiously incited mob outbreaks, like the 1857 Muslim mob attack on a Zoroastrian colony in Bombay and the retaliatory Zoroastrian attack on a Muslim funeral. The subcontinent’s blasphemy laws are often described as anti-hate-speech laws that the state created to deter communal conflict, they were not specific to Islam and carried a maximum sentence of up to two years. With that argument, it is worth considering that India was, and still remains, a largely heterogeneous society where colonial administrators imposed such instruments to overcome civil disobedience that could lead to mutinous anti-colonial activity. This no longer holds true for the largely Muslim Pakistan, and hasn’t since the split in 1947, making the communal conflict deterrence aspect more redundant.

The next clause added was in 1927, after Raj Pal, a Hindu publisher, was accused of blasphemy and acquitted by the courts. Ilm-ud-Din, a young Muslim carpenter, disgruntled by the ruling, stabbed Pal to death a few months later. The colonial British reacted by creating another law — section 295-A — that stated if anyone with deliberate and malicious intent outraged the religious feelings of any class of Indian citizens, they shall be punished with imprisonment of up to ten years, a fine, or both. Although section 295-A might have been somewhat successful in curbing religious violence targeted at a certain group in the times of the British Raj, this law paved the way for institutionalized violence against specific groups in a future Pakistan rife with sectarian tension.

When Pakistan was created in 1947, the colonial laws became part of the country’s constitution and remained untouched until the regime of General Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s most influential dictator, infamous for exploiting Islamic rhetoric for maintaining and legitimizing his dictatorship.

Between 1981 and 1986, Zia contributed five new, drastic sections to the blasphemy laws — 295-B, 295-C, 298-A, 298-B, and 298-C. While the earlier laws protected all citizens, the new clauses only protected Islam: prohibiting disregarding the Holy Quran, Holy Prophet, and His companions; and targeted the Ahmadi Muslim movement by criminalizing members of the movement who identified or practiced as Muslims.

Before Zia’s amendments, the maximum punishment for insulting someone else’s religion was a ten-year sentence, but thanks to Zia’s changes, which are still in force today, blasphemy culprits face a possible life imprisonment, or even death. For many self-appointed defenders of Islam, this hefty punishment further legitimized murdering the blasphemer, creating disarray in the system and engendering more violence. Zia’s amendments also changed the level of intent necessary to be established for the accused blasphemer: "deliberate intentions" was removed, leaving no requirement of intentions and malice in 295-B and 295-C. This makes it almost too easy to accuse, and sentence, suspects.

Currently, the conversation about amendments in the blasphemy law is shadowed by the 2011 murder of Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, by his own bodyguard for attempting to start a debate about reforming blasphemy laws. Thousands celebrated this "victory" of Islam, including lawyers who showered Taseer’s assassin with rose petals and congratulated him for implementing the blasphemy law himself. After all, they said, the bodyguard had just done what the police and courts would have done eventually.

And to some extent, those lawyers were right. On one hand, the Punjab government has arrested 43 people for the brutal murder of Shama and Shehzad, while on the other hand, merely two days after this incident, an assistant sub-inspector of the police in Gujrat — a city in Punjab only about 100 miles from where Shama and Shehzad were murdered — has been accused of extra-judicially murdering an allegedly blasphemous Shi’ite man. Reports say the sub-inspector hacked him to death with an axe because the officer could not bear anyone disrespecting the Holy Prophet’s companions.

Pakistan’s police force bears a large responsibility in giving rise to this kind of vigilantism. Last year when policemen in Lahore were informed that thousands of enraged Muslims were planning to descend upon the prominently Christian Joseph Colony, instead of attempting to hold back the mob by calling in reinforcements, the police ordered the residents of the community to immediately vacate their houses. The mob arrived the next day and burned down 150 Christian homes, all as the police idly stood by.

Moreover, just as public hangings, executions, and floggings gained prominence in the 1980s under Zia’s regime, such displays of extra-legalized violence continue to this day with staged police encounters. Every so often in Punjab, you will hear of policemen killing alleged criminals in a shoot-out, whose bodies are then paraded across the city. These policemen are often rewarded with praise and promotions.

Blasphemy-related vigilantism operates at the complex node where the Pakistani state’s failure meets its complicity. Does the state not punish the mob and those that incited the crowds because it cannot or because it does not want to? Case files of blasphemy trials prove that, out of the 104 blasphemy cases presented between 1960 and 2007, judges dismissed 29 percent after discovering that blasphemy accusations were being employed to cloud personal vendettas, land disputes, political or professional jealousies, marital disputes, and prior religious or sectarian frictions. However, despite this misuse of the law, religious parties have taken up the shield of blasphemy laws, and to some degree this may explain why the government is hesitant to make amendments.

Following Zia’s footsteps, religious parties have often used the blasphemy law to gain influence over religiously sensitive segments of the country. The Pakistani state and military have a convoluted relationship with religious parties, and in the larger scope of things allowing the parties to keep this law does not harm the state in any direct way. In fact, given the wave of intolerance present in certain pockets of the nation leaving the law untouched is probably, both physically and ideologically, safer for the state.

The murder of Shama and Shehzad Masih incited some protests and vigils, with rights activists and politicians alike issuing statements condemning the violence. The chief minister of Punjab even went to meet with the family of the victims, and announced that they would be awarded with compensation money. But the traumatized Masihs have packed up and left the village, much like the families of the victims of Shantinagar in 1997, Gojra in 2009, Mehrabadi in 2013, and Joseph Colony in 2013. The police force’s incompetence and sub-standard training, and large amounts of public pressure from extremist segments and the charged public, often make it impossible to combat this vigilante justice.

Within discourses in Pakistan’s much-touted free media, one such belief is that the law itself is not faulty, but it is only the weak implementation of the law by the police and court systems that is the problem. But the truth is that until the state admits responsibility for the protection of its citizens, and simultaneously stirs a conversation to start winning popular opinion about making major constitutional amendments, nothing can change, and Shama and Shahzad will have died in vain.

Maham Javaid was previously a desk editor at Herald, a Karachi-based news magazine. She has reported on Pakistan for Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera America and is presently completing a graduate degree in Near Eastern Studies at New York University.