: The Sialkot Lynching Underscores the Danger of State-Sanctioned Religious Hate in Pakistan and India #WorldNEWS The gruesome lynching of a foreign national by religious extremists in Pakistan last

The Sialkot Lynching Underscores the Danger of State-Sanctioned Religious Hate in Pakistan and India #WorldNEWS
The gruesome lynching of a foreign national by religious extremists in Pakistan last week poses important lessons for India, whose Hindu nationalist rulers are pursuing the same policy of state-driven fundamentalism that now plagues their arch-enemy.
On Dec. 3, hundreds of people in the city of Sialkot, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, were party to the killing of a Sri Lankan factory manager. Priyantha Kumara, a Christian, had merely removed from factory machinery the stickers of an extreme right-wing party that featured Quranic verses, ahead of a visit by international clients. Seeing this as desecration, the mob dragged him out, beat him to death and set his body on fire.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=true]
Prime Minister Imran Khan called it “a day of shame for Pakistan” and promised justice. Clerics condemned the violence as “un-Islamic. ” More than 100 people were arrested over the murder, but it all might be a bit late. The lynching is a reminder of “how far this nation has descended into the abyss”, lamented the country’s Dawn newspaper. “What have we become?” tweeted one anguished Pakistani. “We’ve created monsters,” read another pained tweet.
Read More: What Pakistan Gains from the Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan
The young men taking selfies in front of the burning corpse speak to the brutal zeal of Pakistan’s youth, radicalized by a process decades in the making. Since a blood-drenched independence, and the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947, the Pakistani elite has incrementally ceded ground to radical Islamist forces.
The hatred in Sialkot has deep roots
From the beginning, the promise of Pakistan’s founding leaders to grant equal citizenship to all sounded implausible, given that the country broke away from India on the basis of religion. As the newly minted nation went about forging a federation of ethnic groups that had little in common apart from their faith, top-down secularism ran up against bottom-up Islamism. Unlike Hindu-majority India, which adopted a secular constitution within two years of its independence from the British, Pakistan continued to wrestle with its identity and struggled to frame its constitution for years. It finally declared itself an Islamic Republic in 1956.
The influence of religious parties and the clergy subsequently grew, helped by the Pakistani military’s use of India as the bogeyman to justify the undermining of democratic institutions and its own immense power. Framing the rivalry in religious terms—with Muslim Pakistan as the counter to Hindu India—it became imperative for the generals to befriend the mullahs, who helped keep secular parties in check.