Lives on the Line

Decades after anti-Pakistan slogans first erupted in Kashmir following a cleric’s assassination, renewed violence against Shias in Pakistan has reignited protests and highlighted state silence.

- Syed Eesar Mehdi

Pakistan was imagined as a homeland for Muslims of South Asia, a place where they could feel secure and have a political voice after years of colonial rule.

But from early on, the country struggled with a basic question about belonging.

Almost 80 years later, that question still hangs over the country, akin to what an erstwhile top general once called the “unfinished business” of Partition.

Who counts as a Muslim? Whose interpretation holds weight? And whose lives are considered worth protecting?

‘These debates continue to shape the state.

It is within this unresolved space that the situation of Shias in Pakistan must be understood.

‘Their persecution follows a clear pattern. It grows out of deep structures and rigid ideas, and it continues because the state repeatedly chooses silence and inaction.

To grasp this reality, James C. Scott’s book Seeing Like a State offers a powerful theoretical entry point.

Scott argues that modern states simplify complex social worlds in order to govern them, elevating those groups that fit neatly into official vi sions of order while marginalizing those that complicate it.

Populations that do not serve the state’s dominant ideological or political project are rendered expendable, treated as noise, surplus, or, in Scott’s words, “weeds”.

Shias of “Mamlakat-e-Khuda-dad” increasingly inhabit this expendable category.

They exist within the state’s borders but outside its moral importance.

Before Scott's framework becomes fully legible, however, Pakistan's political logic must be situated within broader philosophical debates on power, exclusion, and violence.

Hannah Arendt’s contemplations on the banality of evil help explain how extraordinary violence becomes routinized when institutions normalize indifference.