Pakistan on Friday witnessed the horrific mob lynching of a Sri Lankan national in Sialkot over allegation of blasphemy, forcing Prime Minister Imran Khan to call it "a day of shame" for the country.

Image: A screengrab of the horrific burning of the Srilankan factory manager

On the same day, local media reported the "mysterious" death of a Christian man in Peshawar and the cause behind his death is under investigation, though police suspect the man was either hanged or strangulated.

Sialkot lynching and its links with "Labbaik"

Multiple footage of Sialkot lynching captured by bystanders have gone viral on social media platforms. It caught the mob chanting slogans of "Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah" while torturing the Sri Lankan manager of a local factory to death and buring his body publicly on Wazirabad Road.

The Sri Lankan victim, who has been identified as Priyantha Kumara, was accused of desecrating posters bearing the name of Prophet Muhammad.

Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), an once banned hardline Islamist group in Pakstan which recently held the government to ransom over its demand to expel the French envoy, has now been de-proscripted by the Imran Khan government after reaching a deal with it.

The Pak government of Imran Khan last month struck a deal with the hardline outfit, and released hundreds of its jailed "leader-activists" to end the two-week-long violent clashes that have resulted in the death of seven policemen.

The TLP, which had began a march to the Pak capital calling for the release of jailed leader Saad Rizvi and the expulsion of France's ambassador over publication of caricatures depicting the Prophet Mohammad in a French satirical magazine, later called off the violent protest march following the Imran Khan-led Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government's meek surrender to the radical outfit.

According to experts, Pakistan's surrender to the TLP was inevitable as the country has been weakened by religious and other extra-constitutional forces for giving too much space to them and also for deploying religious extremism as a policy tool since long back.

Political experts said with the hardline groups like Labbaik getting more power and space, such incidents of lynching and other forms of faith-based violences will grow in the Islamic country where religious minorities were never "safe".

Blasphemy laws in Pakistan

The blasphemy laws practiced by Pakistan are too dangerous as the country often uses it against religious minorities as the Pak government has charged more than 1855 people under the blasphemy laws between 1987 and February 2021, with a significant spike in 2020, according to the Centre for Social Justice in Pakistan.

Calling the Pakistani blasphemy laws "abusive", the European Parliament, in April, adopted a joint motion for a resolution on such laws in Pakistan.

According to reports, the motion referred to two specific cases, those of Shagufta Kausar and Shafqat Emmanuel who are a Pakistani Christian couple convicted of blasphemy by a Pakistani court, and sentenced to death by hanging back in 2013.

The couple were alleged to have sent a blasphemous message against the Prophet, and despite the couple being illiterate and the message being in English, they did not stand a chance of succeeding in their defense against the dangerous blasphemy provisions and a "collapsing" legal system.

Image: Unsplash

Ironically, public support for strict blasphemy laws in Pakistan is reportedly very strong which has been supporting the country to use and misuse the law against targeted religious minorities.

Recently, four men, reportedly all Muslim, were arrested in the Punjabi village of Khodi Khushal Singh, near the eastern city of Lahore, under charges of blasphemy for allegedly "disrespecting the mosque and insulting Islam" by cursing a mosque's imam (religious cleric).

The initial police report read: “As soon as they (the accused) arrived at the mosque, they started cursing the mosque’s imam (religious cleric), disrespected the mosque and insulted Islam.”

Local authorities claimed those men had arrived at the mosque with a demand to have the death of a Christian man announced and they argued with the imam who rejected their proposal.

International human rights activists say despite calls from the global human rights groups, incidents of faith-based violence, lynching and arrests under the "abusive" blasphemy laws have been growing rapidly when the country's government is just a spectator and a "silent influencer".

With Pakistan already blacklisted in global platforms as a sponsor of terrorism, and its unabashed role in the return of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan now known to all, the lynch-mob killing of a foreign national (Srilankan) only reinforced the belief that the world's second largest Muslim populated country is now a "No Country for non-Muslims".