Religious violence towards minorities: The case of Youhanabad Church attack in Pakistan

Abstract

Violence in general but religion-based violence, in particular, has been an unsettling, however ubiquitous, feature of Pakistani society. While there are economic, social, ideological, and psychological causes for why individuals engage in various acts of violence, particularly those against minority and marginalized groups are usually systemic. That is to say that either the system actively perpetuates it or passively observes it as it happens without doing anything to stop it. In Pakistan, religious violence is a result of both active perpetuations through discriminatory laws like blasphemy and or the prejudiced school curriculum and passive observation. Furthermore, in a larger context, all of this can be attributed to myopic state policies which sought to unify the nation by using Islam as a political tool to break ethnic strongholds. As it turns out, this policy has been disastrous for minority and marginalized groups. This paper seeks to understand the dynamics of religious violence in Pakistan to explain the twin attacks on Youhanabad Church in 2015. Furthermore, it undertakes a qualitative study i.e., conducting interviews with the victims of the 2015 church attack, to get insight into their feelings and how they are dealing with different emotional and economic effects of the tragedy.