Pluralism and Peace in South Asia

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between religious pluralism and peace in the context of South Asia. It notes that today South Asia is one of the most hostile regions of the world for religious pluralism, owing, in large part, to resurgent religious nationalism. It argues that attempts to establish religious uniformity have worked at cross purposes with the desired goal of cultivating stability and security in Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan.

Keywords:

• religious pluralism
• nationalism
• peace
• South Asia
• India
• Pakistan
• Sri Lanka

What is the relationship between religious pluralism—respect for and mutual understanding with religious traditions that are not one’s own—and peace? One view holds that a common religious culture decreases grievances among members of the dominant faith tradition and promotes stability and security. According to this logic, religious pluralism, by contrast, breeds conflict along communal lines. Another view holds the opposite: the promotion of a hegemonic religious culture at the expense of religious minorities carries negative security implications, stemming not just from aggrieved minorities but also from empowered religious majorities who use the laws and policies of the state to justify aggression against religious outsiders. Which side is right?

Birthplace to a number of the world’s religious traditions, naturally diverse in religious expression, but also witnessing a growing threat to its pluralist character in the form of resurgent religious nationalism, the region of South Asia provides an ideal location to examine the relationship between pluralism and peace. The two major countries in the region—India and Pakistan—were built on foundations of religious pluralism. Today, though, the region is home to some of the societies most hostile to religious pluralism in the world, despite the presence of reasonably robust democratic institutions and dynamic civil societies. The latest study on global religious restrictions by the Pew Research Center documents that of the seven countries in the region, six (India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Maldives) enforce “high” or “very high” governmental restrictions on religion, and the lone exception, Sri Lanka, is moving in that direction. Six of the seven countries also experience “high” or “very high” social hostilities involving religion (with Bhutan being the exception). This means that every country in South Asia is witnessing, in one form or another, serious threats to religious pluralism. Average levels of government restriction on religion in South Asia are more than twice as high as the global average; average levels of social hostilities involving religion are more than three times higher (Pew Research Center 2018).

Why, despite auspicious conditions a generation ago, is the region of South Asia the most hostile to religious pluralism outside of the Middle East and North Africa today? One of the major reasons concerns how religious majorities in these countries respond to the presence of religious minorities. The dominant response to religious heterogeneity in South Asia has been characterized by resurgent religious nationalism. Religious nationalists in the region see their states inextricably intertwined with the dominant religious traditions of their countries. In this view, religious diversity is perceived as a threat, associated with moral relativism and competition for converts away from the “true faith.” The increasing nationalist sentiments rooted in religion throughout the region have resulted in social fragility and violence, often carried out by members of the dominant faith tradition, supported by the laws and policies of the state, against religious minorities.

This article argues that a commitment to religious pluralism can make countries safer. It proceeds as follows. The next section explores two contending views on the relationship between pluralism and peace. Thereafter, I consider recent developments in three South Asian countries—Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan—showing that attempts to establish religious uniformity have worked at cross purposes with the desired goal of cultivating stability and security. A third section concludes.

Pluralism and Peace? Two Contending Views

Religious pluralism, as defined here, not only entails the equal status of all faith communities within a country, but also suggests a proactive approach to building trust and understanding between those of different religious traditions and protecting the liberty of conscience of all people of faith, irrespective of one’s own religious commitments. It is a mutual pledge, and resulting actions thereof, to engage, respect, and protect the liberty of those who do not belong to one’s own faith or worldview community. Religious pluralism is protected at the state level by the laws and policies of governments and at the society level through cultural and religious norms that make it possible for people of different worldviews to live together peacefully and productively. In other words, a healthy, robust, and resilient environment of religious pluralism is not just the state of faith-based diversity that exists in a country, it is the approach that governments and societies take in dealing with that diversity.

There are two competing views on the relationship between religious pluralism and peace and conflict. The first argues that pluralism breeds conflict along communal lines. This view has strong roots in Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory (Huntington 1993, 1996). Writing in response to those who believed that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism would flourish with the end of the Cold War, Huntington argued that the “the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations” rather than between peoples within civilizations (Huntington 1993, 22). In Huntington’s framework, these civilizations are based primarily on predominant religious traditions. Thus, the theory of clashing civilizations holds that religiously plural countries will be at greater risk for religiously-based conflict. The clash thesis necessarily recommends that civilizations should maintain their unity by promoting inter-civilizational cooperation and limiting multiculturalism and immigration.

Now, more than 25 years after Huntington originally presented his clash of civilizations thesis in the pages of Foreign Affairs, what does the available evidence tell us about how well the clash thesis explains conflict in the real world? Anecdotally, we can point to several counter examples of religiously plural—but also peaceful—societies. In Singapore, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, and Protestants all live in peace with one another despite occupying the same tiny island. Interreligious conflict has been similarly absent in countries like Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam despite the many different forms of religious expression. Senegal is home to a wide variety of ethnic groups and a sizeable religious minority, yet it has not experienced the radicalization of religion in ways that the clash thesis would predict. The United States—the most ethnic and religiously diverse country in the world—has experienced recent tensions between religious communities, but its broader history testifies to the power of pluralism in promoting peace and stability. Greater still is the tremendous diversity found in any one of Huntington’s “seven or eight” civilizations. Indeed, today there are more conflicts within rather than between civilizations. Academic studies have generally concluded that the clash thesis, while correctly predicting that religion would be an important feature in post-cold war global politics, was basically wrong in its argument that global politics would be marked by conflict along civilizational lines (Fox 2004, 2005, 2019).

Nevertheless, it appears as if many contemporary world leaders have implicitly accepted the logic of clashing civilizations, seeing religious pluralism as a threat to their societies. They have arrived at the conclusion that a common religious culture can serve a legitimating function in their states if it can be harnessed in the service of boosting nationalism, fostering a shared identity, helping to pacify citizens, and ensuring social stability and national security, which they believe are threatened by religious outsiders. To this end, they have sought to coopt an amenable strain of the predominant faith tradition within their countries, making it dependent on or beholden to the government, by putting policies in place that favor dominant religious majorities, including special legal privileges or the ability to regulate religious or political life at the expense of minorities. At the same time, in partnering with dominant faith traditions, these states have enforced laws or official policies which inhibit or prevent members of certain or all minority religious communities from carrying out practices central to their faith-based commitments. Examples of these violations include, but are not limited to, onerous restrictions on building and maintaining houses of worship, arbitrary confiscation of property, prohibitions on the wearing of religious garb, mandatory religious identification on legal documents, restrictions on proselytizing, discriminatory school curricula, and laws prohibiting blasphemy or apostasy. In exchange, dominant religious institutions provide the state with legitimacy and a sense of cohesion.

A contending view on pluralism, conflict, and peace is found in the “religious economies” school (Finke and Stark 1988; Iannaccone 1991, 1992; Iannaccone, Finke, and Stark 1997). This view holds that a commitment to pluralism makes societies more secure. Extremist ideas tend not to flourish in open religious systems marked by healthy religious economies where religious actors and ideas enjoy protection and access to political and social life, where states and societies do not attempt to impose a religious monopoly, and where governments do not selectively subsidize religious groups in a partial manner (Grim and Finke 2011). Countries which refuse to systematically discriminate against religious groups in society, thereby protecting pluralism, allow for a wide range of religious practices and doctrinal interpretations to flourish. On the other hand, the restricting of religious pluralism through legal and social structures serves to create an environment of ignorance, superstition, prejudice, and distrust, leading to less communal harmony and social stability and more violence (Grim and Finke 2011; Saiya 2018).

Conversely, in countries where pluralism is respected and diversity is not seen as a threat, people of faith do not have to focus their time, energy, and resources on avoiding persecution and maintaining their identities and practices. They are freed to make positive contributions to society. Religious actors, acting on the most fundamental teachings of their faiths, are free to contribute to the betterment of their societies as part of their religious mission. The protection of pluralism thus unlocks the “spiritual capital” of faith-based actors. In many parts of the world, religious communities have been instrumental in increasing literacy, reducing poverty, promoting development, providing access to potable water, administering healthcare, running counseling centers, and leading peace and reconciliation processes. Religious pluralism is strongly related to a host of other goods that are hallmarks of stable societies including “better health outcomes, higher levels of earned income, and better educational opportunities for women” (Grim 2010, 4). In short, religious communities, acting on the most fundamental teachings of their faith, have made incredibly positive contributions to societies that might have otherwise been suppressed through the restricting of religious pluralism. This religious influence, made possible through a commitment to religious pluralism, has led to more peaceful, stable, and secure societies.

As discussed below, the case of South Asia strongly supports the religious economies perspective. When dominant religions possess disproportionate influence in the state, this leads to intolerance of minority faith traditions and conflict between majority and minority groups. Interestingly, as will be discussed, the instability in these societies tends not to be fomented by those on the receiving end of discrimination but by those of dominant religions who consider the existence of minority faiths to be intolerable and threatening to privileged faiths.

The South Asian Context

The region of South Asia presents an ideal environment for assessing the perils of constraining religious pluralism. In every one of the region’s countries, social and legal restrictions on the ability of minorities to freely worship and live out their faith publicly have been rising sharply. Hostility to religious minorities is driven by increasingly violent strains of ethno-religious nationalism, extremist ideologies that politicize religion, and governments that seek to pander to dominant religious communities for fear of losing their voter bank. This section examines the effect of restricting pluralism in three South Asian countries: Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan. One of the common threads running through these cases concerns the fact that the threats to peace and stability do not generally hail from disaffected or marginalized communities, but rather from majoritarian religious populations that enjoy special prerogatives from the state and seek the suppression of religious pluralism. Majoritarian religious groups in these countries suffer from a “minority complex” insofar as they perceive a threat to their dominant status from high population growth among religious minorities, leading to instability and conflict spirals.

Sri Lanka

From 1983 to 2009, Sri Lanka, the tiny island nation situated at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent, witnessed a sanguinary civil war fought between a militant group known as the Tamil Tigers and the government. In the face of extraordinarily brutal repression at the hands of the Sinhalese Buddhist state, the (primarily Hindu) Tamil Tigers fought to create an independent state in the northeastern part of the country. Over 100,000 civilians perished in the course of the conflict.

When the civil war in Sri Lanka ended in 2009, many Sri Lankans and foreign observers alike hoped to see the de-escalation of tensions and the re-establishment of relatively harmonious religious and ethnic relations among the various communities in the country. Instead, the end of the war has given rise to a widening gulf between the country’s ethnic and religious groups and renewed Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, supported by an establishment that fears alienating the dominant Buddhist population. This alliance between religious nationalists and the state sees Sri Lanka as a Sinhala Buddhist country, not one that should be multi-religious or multi-ethnic, and threatens to destroy religious pluralism and any shared sense of belonging.

A new facet of resurgent religious nationalism in Sri Lanka involves a growing resentment towards and mobilization against the Muslim community by extremist Buddhist organizations. The recent and spreading prejudice against Muslims has been, in large measure, a response to Sri Lanka’s growing Muslim population. Buddhist nationalist groups like Bodo Bala Sena, Ravana Balava, Sinhala Ravana, and the Sinhale Jathika Balamuluwa have launched massive campaigns, both online and on the ground, to restrict Sri Lanka’s religious pluralism, by, among other things, calling for a ban on different forms of the full-faced Islamic veil, the elimination of halal certification and cattle slaughter, the restriction of mosque construction, the boycotting of Muslim businesses, and the regulation of travel to the Middle East. They have spread Islamophobia among Buddhist communities through protests, rallies, and leaflet campaigns. Importantly, the government has tacitly (and in some cases overtly) supported rallies by these groups against minorities, frequently turning a blind eye to violence orchestrated by them. As noted by Imtiyaz and Mohamed-Saleem (2015, 194–195), “there is recognized sympathy among the government coalition members … for the [Bodo Bala Sena] campaign.”

What effect has resurgent Buddhist nationalism and the constraining of religious pluralism had on stability and security in Sri Lanka? Five years after the end of its civil war, Sri Lanka witnessed communal rioting in 2014 between Buddhists and Muslims, resulting in the displacement of about 10,000 people. The riots, which began following a speech by the leader of Bodo Bala Sena, Galagoda Atte Gnansara, came to an end only after the imposition of a military curfew, but the perpetrators of violence were not brought to justice. In 2017, Buddhist nationalists, including a large contingency of monks, forced a group of Rohingya refugees to flee to a United Nations shelter in Colombo. In 2018, Sinhalese Buddhist mobs attacked Muslims in a series of religious riots in the towns of Kandy and Ampara. Calm was restored only when the government took extremely stringent measures, not only shutting down Facebook and other social media, but declaring a state of emergency. Both the 2014 and 2018 riots demonstrated the inability—or, more scandalously, the unwillingness—of the government to take meaningful and sustained action against Bodo Bala Sena and related groups. My analysis of the Global Terrorism Database shows that from 2013 to 2017, Buddhist extremists carried out almost 50 identifiable attacks against Sri Lankan Muslim targets, including shrines and mosques. (Dozens more attacks occurred that were likely committed by extremist Buddhist groups, but the perpetrators of these strikes could not be clearly identified.)

During that time, Muslims did not commit a single identifiable act of terrorism. Nevertheless, the growing discrimination against Muslims by the state and demonization of Muslims by Buddhist nationalists in society over the last few years has contributed to the radicalization of the country’s Muslim population. The deadliest terror attack in any country outside of a war zone since the strikes by al Qaeda on September 11, 2001 took place in 2019 in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo. On Easter Sunday, a series of coordinated suicide attacks struck crowded churches, bustling luxury hotels, and a housing complex, resulting in the deaths of some 250 people, mostly Christian worshippers. The Colombo attacks are an unfortunate and troubling reminder of the country’s long history of communal violence. It stands to reason that the attackers may have deliberately selected their targets—churches and luxury hotels—because they are symbols of a powerful Western-backed political and economic elite. Christians, especially the Catholic Church, have long been associated with this elite. Sri Lanka’s generally repressive environment created a climate conducive to this kind of attack, and the attackers likely viewed Christians as being complicit in the state’s marginalization of Islam.

The government response to the attacks was to double down on policies restricting religious pluralism. In the days following the attacks, Sri Lanka took the unusual step of banning face coverings as part of emergency legislation. The law banned any face garment that “hinders identification.” “The ban is to ensure national security … No one should obscure their faces to make identification difficult,” Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena said in justifying the decision. The president’s office argued it would develop “a peaceful and reconciled society” (Presidential Media Division of Sri Lanka 2019). Many justified the measure in the hopes that it would encourage assimilation of ethnic and religious minorities. Opponents of the law worried about the precedent the law would set, especially with respect to the freedom of Muslim women who consider the wearing of veils to be a religious obligation.

In summary, although the particular actors are different, violent extremism in Sri Lanka—in its Buddhist, Hindu, and now Muslim manifestations—has similar roots. In the same way that the ruthlessness of the Sinhalese government drove Tamils to take up the gun against the state, marginalization of Muslims and widespread Islamophobia since the end of the civil war may be having a similar effect on Sri Lanka’s Muslim population. The resurgence of Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka who prey on the fears of the majority Sinhala Buddhist community has helped create a less stable and more violent social climate, as demonstrated by increasing riots, mob attacks, and terrorist incidents. How the government responds to this reality will matter greatly for the stability of Sri Lanka. If it takes a hardline stance and refuses to address systemic issues of bias and discrimination—as seen in the state’s response to the Easter Sunday attacks—it will continue to fertilize a breeding ground for extremism and violence. In this case, Sri Lanka stands on the verge of a new age of terror.

India

The preamble to India’s constitution, which reflects the thinking of India’s early leaders regarding the importance of religious pluralism, declares India to be a secular country, with freedom of religion explicitly guaranteed in Article 15. These leaders did not believe that the majority Hindu population should receive preferential treatment from the state. Thus, official laws and policies in India comport to Mohandas Gandhi’s Hindu-inspired vision of a pluralist and tolerant democracy based on freedom and equality for all of India’s religious communities.

On the other hand, despite these pluralist underpinnings, in many ways India has failed to live up to its liberal founding ideals after the death of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Subsequent leaders, including Nehru’s daughter Indira and grandson Rajiv, worked to appeal to and coopt Hinduism in order to gain religious credibility, thus moving the country from the ideals of Nehruvian secularism and pluralism towards a partnered relationship between religion and state. This transformation in religion-state arrangements led to discrimination against minority religious communities—a development that paved the way for the growing communalization of Indian society and politics and the development of an illiberal political theology associated with Hindu nationalism (Hindutva). This theology calls not for equality amongst India’s religious groups as declared in the constitution, but rather for an integration between Hinduism and state institutions in which majority Hindus enjoy a special status. For their part, the national government and many state governments have actively supported Hindu nationalists and cultivated strong ties to Hindu leaders and bodies to the detriment of minority religious groups like Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians. This reality has had the effect of contradicting the spirit of the Indian constitution, which calls for a secular state in which no single religious tradition can impose its will on the rest. At the society level, inter-religious tension has been a constant reality in India, its post-independence history checkered by coerced religious conversions, religious and cultural intolerance, riots, and physical assaults on minorities.

India experienced a shift in its religious climate beginning in the 1990s, when, for the first time, Hindu nationalism captured political power at the national level. The growing political dominance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at both the state and national levels has empowered Hindu nationalist groups throughout the country committed to the ideology of Hindutva. These groups are greatly concerned that the numbers of adherents of minority religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, will continue to rise relative to the Hindu population, significantly affecting electoral dynamics and threatening India’s status as a Hindu nation. They have, accordingly, resisted the growth of minority religious groups, promoted various forms of legal discrimination, and, in some cases, encouraged or participated in violence against these groups.

Among the many issues involved in inter-religious conflict in India, few are considered as controversial—and threatening—as conversion. The issue of conversion is particularly important as the ability of individuals to freely enter or exist religious communities is the hallmark of religious pluralism. As of this writing, seven of India’s states enforce “anti-conversion laws”—known officially as “freedom of religion” bills. These are state-level statutes designed to regulate religious conversions done through “forcible” and “fraudulent” means, including “inducement” and “allurement.” Through these laws, right-wing Hindu groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—the ideological arm of the BJP—seek to perpetuate the identity of India as a predominantly Hindu nation by regulating conversions to non-Hindu religions. Because anti-conversion laws are often passed at the behest of Hindu nationalist groups who fear that India’s Hindu character is under siege from the growth of competing faiths, they disproportionately target religious minorities in the states where they exist, namely Muslims and Christians, both groups for whom proselytism is central to the teachings of their faiths. The prejudicial intent of anti-conversion laws is seen in the fact that they are not used to prosecute members of the Hindu majority. The basic structure and content of these laws varies only minimally between states, as newer laws tend to be modeled on earlier statutes in other states. Another important issue concerns the vagueness of the wording of anti-conversion laws. The prohibition against using “force, fraud, or allurement” in proselytization efforts would generally be applauded by advocates of human rights and religious liberty, except that these terms are so loosely defined in the anti-conversion statutes that virtually any conversion can be attributed to the use of “allurement” (assurances of eternal life, salvation, and inherent worth, especially for the lower castes and tribes), insofar as the laws do not distinguish spiritual from material forms of allurement. Predictably, then, the definitional ambiguity part and parcel of anti-conversion laws leaves government officials—who are often aligned with Hindu nationalists groups—with a great deal of discretion regarding what constitutes their violation (Sahoo 2018, 69–70). State-level anti-conversion laws are of particular importance given the authority granted to states in India’s federalist form of government, the abuse of these laws by states pandering to their Hindu electorates, and the ineffective and corrupt law enforcement machinery that both empowers Hindu nationalists and fails to protect religious minorities from persecution.

Do measures designed to encourage religious homogenization in India like anti-conversion laws prevent conflict along communal lines as proponents claim? The available evidence suggests that this is not the case. Today, India has the highest levels of social hostilities involving religion in the world, according to the Pew Research Center (Pew Research Center 2018). In the case of anti-conversion laws, my research reveals that Indian states with anti-conversion enforcement experience around ten times the number of cases of violent religious persecution when compared to states with no anti-conversion legislation. Often, the perpetrators of violence cite conversion of Hindus by Christian missionaries and the perceived relative increase of Christianity as major reasons behind the outbreak of hostility, and use the laws passed by the state to violently resist conversion (Sahoo 2018). Instead of promoting respect for religion—the very thing that proponents of these laws believe they do—laws inhibiting conversion create and sustain environments of hostility towards religious minorities, thus empowering the voices of extremism and promoting religious conflict. The reason why is fairly straightforward: the presence of these laws encourages harassment and violence against religious minorities accused of engaging in “forcible conversions” by forces of communalism who claim they are simply enforcing the law. In states enforcing anti-conversion laws, Hindu vigilantes have often attacked with impunity individuals, homes, places of worship, and businesses of those believed to be proselytizing and converting others to their faith, using the very laws passed by the state to justify their violence.

The link between anti-conversion laws and violence is only the latest example of how the restricting of religious pluralism in India leads to social upheaval and violent religious extremism. Major episodes of violence rooted in religious discrimination include the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in 1984, the anti-Hindu riots in Kashmir in 2000, the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002, and the anti-Christian riots in Odisha in 2008. Since the BJP retook parliament in 2014, India has witnessed a renewed assault on religious pluralism including vandalism, burglary, and arson against minority houses of worship; “reconversion” programs; and renewed bouts of communal violence. By the end of 2019, faith-based terrorism in India had reached an all-time high, with attacks being carried out by individuals associated with all of India’s major faith communities. While the impeding of religious pluralism does not account for every instance of violence in India, it does shed light on an important structural cause behind its recent increase.

In summary, despite its venerable tradition of tolerance between religious communities and its legal framework supportive of religious pluralism, India today is witnessing a serious threat to its secular and pluralist character and commitment to religious freedom for all. Anti-conversion laws represent perhaps the most compelling example of how the politicization of religious identity in India and the attempt to establish India’s national identity on a single religion suppresses religious pluralism and produces intercommunal hostility and less stability and security. As India continues to experience widespread religious hostilities, the country’s leaders would do well to remember Gandhi’s timeless words:

If the Hindus believe that India should be peopled only by Hindus, they are living in dreamland. The Hindus, the Mahomedans, the Parsis, and the Christians who have made India their country are fellow countrymen, and they will have to live in unity, if only for their own interest. (Gandhi 1963, 29)

Only by accepting Gandhi’s idea of a harmonious Indian nation based in religious pluralism will India be able to overcome its sectarian divides and communal hostilities which have all too often manifested in violence.

Pakistan

Like India, its neighbor to the West, Pakistan, also has its roots in religious pluralism. Though its founder Muhammad Jinnah established the country as a homeland for Muslims, he also believed that it should provide freedom for those of minority faiths. In his 1947 speech to the Constituent Assembly, Jinnah gave an eloquent defense of religious pluralism, which he hoped would provide a necessary basis for tolerance and inclusivity given his new country’s diversity:

You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State … We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle: that we are all citizens, and equal citizens of one State (quoted in Thames 2014, 41).

Although originally founded as a secular state after partition from India, successive Pakistani governments attempted to regulate religious pluralism in order to gain the support of certain Islamic groups—ones that have pushed Pakistan further in the direction of partnership between mosque and state. The 1956 Constitution declares Pakistan to be an “Islamic Republic”—making it the world’s first officially Islamic country—and prohibited the passage of any law contrary to the Qur’an. The constitution requires the country’s president and prime minister to be Muslims; all members of parliament must swear an oath to uphold Islamic principles. This alliance between religion and the state has resulted in a situation where Islam retains a privileged position in public life and is afforded the right to dictate key aspects of law and politics at the expense of minority groups like Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, and Ahmadi Muslims, who are often refused jobs and housing and are frequently the target of physical assaults.

The most obvious way the Pakistani state, in collaboration with religious extremists, attempts to quash religious pluralism is through its draconian blasphemy code. Found in Section XV of the Pakistan Penal Code, blasphemy covers a number of offenses including defiling houses of worship, marring the Qur’an, or speaking negatively about Islam or Mohammed. Penalties for blasphemy include fines, prison sentences, and even death. One of the important issues with respect to blasphemy laws in Pakistan concerns their selective application. For example, although minority groups like Christians, Ahmadis, and Hindus comprise less than three percent of the country’s population, they have accounted for roughly half of those accused of blasphemy-related offenses over the past two decades (Prud’homme 2010, 6). According to former Pakistan Member of Parliament Farahaz Isphani, Pakistani authorities prosecuted almost 1,200 people for blasphemy between 1987 and 2012. The Pakistani legal system, according to Isphani, offers little protection to those accused of blasphemy or their supporters. Often these laws are exploited by extremists for political gain or revenge over petty disputes.

What effect has the attempt to suppress religious pluralism through its blasphemy code had on Pakistani security? The strengthening of blasphemy laws coupled with the move away from Pakistan’s pluralist founding principles has had severe and unfortunate consequences for religious minorities by encouraging a climate of intolerance, increasing the influence of Islamic extremists, and compromising the ability of public officials to uphold the rule of law for all. The vagueness of the language concerning blasphemy has allowed radicals to interpret the code in very loose ways and open-endedly persecute those believed to be guilty of defiling, in any way, “the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad.” Pakistan’s blasphemy law has been exploited by vigilante groups to instigate terrorist attacks and mob violence against those accused of blasphemy. Since 1990, scores of alleged blasphemers have been murdered in extrajudicial killings. Violent vigilantes invoke these very laws to silence those who threaten their ideology and to justify their violence towards the accused. Thus, the application of blasphemy laws serves to prompt and exacerbate social hostilities rather than prevent them. My research shows that countries that have in place and enforce blasphemy laws experience, on average, close to six times as many Islamist terrorist attacks as Muslim-majority countries where such laws either do not exist or are not enforced (Saiya 2017). Others have found an exponential increase in the number of extra-judicial killings related to blasphemy in Pakistan (Mazhar 2015). The same culture that sustains Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy code has given rise to thousands of Islamist terrorist attacks against religious minorities.

Those who speak out against Pakistan’s blasphemy culture or represent those accused of blasphemy are sometimes themselves killed, as in the cases of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, and prominent attorney Rashid Rehman—courageous individuals who took a public stand against the country’s blasphemy code, and specifically, the death sentence of Aasia Bibi, a Christian day laborer who was on death row for eight years for allegedly insulting Islam during an argument with a Muslim coworker. In 2011, Taseer was assassinated in Islamabad as he was about to enter his car after meeting a friend for lunch. In court, Taseer’s own body guard, Mumtaz Qadri, admitted that he had shot Taseer 27 times because of his support for Bibi. Among extremists, Qadri has taken on the status of a hero, once showered with rose petals at one of his court hearings. Meanwhile, the judge who sentenced Qadri was forced to flee the country after receiving death threats. Bhatti, a devout Roman Catholic and Minister for Minority Affairs, received international acclaim for his defense of religious minorities, but, like Taseer, was deeply unpopular with supporters of the blasphemy law. On March 2, 2011, Bhatti was shot multiple times after leaving his mother’s home by the extremist group Tehrik-i-Taliban. The group’s spokesman referred to Bhatti as a blasphemer and warned that “we will continue to target all those who speak against the law which punishes those who insult the prophet. Their fate will be the same” (Guerin 2011). In 2014, Rashid Rehman, a prominent attorney and critic of blasphemy laws, was killed by gunmen for his defense of Junaid Hafeez, a university lecturer charged with blasphemy. The assassination was meant to silence those who oppose the existence of the blasphemy law or defend those accused of blasphemy. Rehman’s killer has yet to be brought to justice.

In 2018, the Pakistani Supreme Court commuted Bibi’s death sentence in the face of mounting international pressure, but not before she had spent over eight years in solitary confinement. Nevertheless, the vigilantism that is part and parcel of Pakistan’s blasphemy culture continues unabated. Allegations of blasphemy have continued to lead to lynchings, riots, and terrorism. Bibi’s release itself sparked social upheaval and a massive effort to overturn the court’s decision.

In summary, it is clear from the available evidence that the Islamization of Pakistani society and the suppressing of religious pluralism has not made Pakistan more secure. The Islamization of Pakistani politics and society, seen most acutely in the country’s draconian blasphemy code, has directly fed Islamist vigilantism, which has become a major security threat to Pakistan and beyond. It has also birthed transnational terrorism that threatens the stability of the region as a whole. Government manipulation of religion (of which the intelligence services and military have also taken part) has served to empower radical elements and engender religiously-based social hostilities as political leaders appeal to fundamentalists in order to make electoral gains, thus lending an aura of legitimacy to their views. If Pakistan is serious about tackling its problem with violent religious extremism and recovering the pluralist vision of its founder, Muhamad Jinnah, a necessary first step involves reforming its blasphemy code.

Conclusion

Given the contemporary realities of global migration and the consequent increasing of religious diversity found in countries around the world, governments are faced with challenges and responsibilities of protecting religious pluralism. This essay has argued that responses to the diversity of religious beliefs, practices, and traditions that exist in the modern world should be marked by a commitment to religious pluralism. States containing significant diversity of religious traditions and beliefs experience more stability and fewer acts of violence than their more culturally homogenous counterparts.

State leaders often justify their support for majority religions on the grounds that such patronage is necessary for fostering a common identity, ensuring social stability, and protecting national security, which they believe are threatened by religious outsiders. These leaders may also believe that through their support for religion they can bolster their domestic standing among their religious constituencies by claiming to be defenders of the majority faith traditions within their states. Political elites thus seek out alliances with dominant religious communities because they hope to mobilize them to their advantage and squelch dissidents who may attempt to challenge their rule. As the region of South Asia reveals, however, attempts to suppress religious pluralism in different ways—the encouraging of a militant Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, the passage of anti-conversion laws in India, and the enforcement of Pakistan’s blasphemy code—have only served to create climates of impunity which encourage instability and violence, stemming not only from those bearing the brunt of inequitable laws and policies, but, more commonly, from extremists hailing from the very religious communities favored by the state.

Acknowledgements

This article is part of the journal's Covenantal Pluralism Series, a project generously supported via a grant to the Institute for Global Engagement from the Templeton Religion Trust.

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Nilay Saiya

Nilay Saiya is an assistant professor of public policy and global affairs at Nanyang Technological University. His research interests concern the intersection of religion and global politics. He is author of the book Weapon of Peace: How Religious Liberty Combats Terrorism (Cambridge, 2018).