Assessing Targeted Violence & Rising Threats against Christians and Shias in Pakistan

• In Event: Faith, Law, and Liberty: Christianity in Global Politics

Abstract

Pakistan has been facing issues concerning targeted violence against religious minority groups, comprising Christians and Muslim Shias. The religion plays significant and influential role in Pakistan's political, judicial, and socio-cultural spheres. The country has grappled with large number of reported incidents of violence, hatred and religious intolerance (Khan et al., 2023, p. 74) against the said religious minorities. Apart from other traditional media, the role and power of social media is also growing in Pakistan, where there are now over 87 million internet users in the country and more than 71 million social media users (Kemp, 2023), and this number is growing daily with Facebook as the most widely used social media platform. Social media has broken all barriers and works as a part of mass media in what has been described by Andrew Chadwick (2017) as a hybrid media system. This study mainly focuses on how social media is used by citizens and social groups, political parties and others, comparing two case studies from the last quarter of 2022-2023, utilizing Facebook and Instagram data. In the first case study, social media became voice of the repressed, and marginalized segment of society when the Christians came under targeted attack by the majority. In this case, the most recent #Jaranwala incident has been taken as key targeted violence when Christians’ houses were burnt to ashes and churches were set on fire etc. The second case is the targeted violence against Shias, their mosques and Imambargas in Pakistan.

Author

• Waseem Khokhar