Lessons from Jhelum

A few miles in the north of Jhelum city a chipboard factory spread over acres lies gutted to ashes. Five homes of the factory staff stand deserted, plundered and burnt as a reminder of the insanity and barbarity displayed at Jhelum last month.

In the afternoon of November 20, an angry mob of thousands laid siege to a factory owned by an Ahmadi man and set it on fire; the mob looted and torched the factory staff homes as well. The local police evacuated the staff and their families whom the mob wanted to burn alive for alleged blasphemy. Only after the army reached the site did the crowd disperse.

The factory staff vehemently denied the charge of blasphemy though they admitted that there were copies of the Quran among the old, worn-out books that were brought in the factory, but they insist that the copies of the Quran were kept aside.

After this incident, the situation was so precarious that the Rangers patrolled the Jhelum city for more than a week and the police negotiated with local clerics to maintain peace. Mischief makers succeeded in creating a perception among the people that copies of the Quran were actually burnt at the factory.

It has become quite easy to incite people to violence by spreading rumours of blasphemy; most people do not care to verify these rumours nor do they rely on law-enforcement agencies to deal with such complaints. Religious hatred and violence in the name of religion have become embedded in society.

The chipboard factory in Jhelum had been burning old books, mostly official printed material of the Ahmadiyya community, in its furnace for years. This is the safest way for them to dispose of their material as they can be booked on charges of illegally proselytising their faith if this literature ends up in other people’s hands. The furnace has a temperature of 200 degree centigrade and burns up pages in a few seconds; no one can get close to the flames.

Most people believed the complainant without checking his motives or verifying the facts, and took it upon themselves to punish the factory-owner despite the fact that the police had arrested the accused worker and got his judicial remand from the district judge in a matter of a few hours. Ironically, those people who were furious on the alleged burning of the Quran wanted to burn to death innocent humans.

The incompetence and neglect of the police department was quite obvious. The loot and arson at the factory could have been prevented had the police realised the sensitivity and gravity of the situation and acted on time. The Jhelum police failed to anticipate that a mob might attack the factory owned by an Ahmadi man despite the fact that they had arrested the accused nominated in the First Information Report.

There have been many incidents of unruly crowds attacking the homes and worship places of minority communities but the police have failed to learn any lesson from these events. The police need to have standard operating procedures (SOPs) describing what preventive measures are to be taken following complaints of blasphemy.

Starting from noon, for the next five to six hours, agent provocateurs used loudspeakers of local mosques asking people to gather at the factory but the Jhelum police did not notice it until the mob thronged the factory and razed it to the ground in the evening. The crowd blocked the main, busy G T Road highway for five hours.

To handle this volatile situation initially only a small group of policemen was present on the occasion. The Jhelum police chief did not summon additional force on time to prevent the situation getting out of hand. The mob dispersed when the army troops from Kharian arrived past midnight. The next day, when a crowd set fire to an Ahmadi place of worship in a nearby village, the police was again absent from the scene.

Had the army not arrived in Jhelum, the mob would have become even more violent. They might have killed the police officers present on the occasion; some people in the mob thought the police had betrayed them by protecting the lives of the people in the factory. The police kept firing in the air to keep the mob away.

Although religious violence is a complex phenomenon, one of the main reasons people repeatedly take the law into their hands is that the police are too weak, corrupt and susceptible to political pressure. In most cases police investigation and prosecution are defective due to which the conviction rate is low; for example, the courts have freed all the accused in the massacre of Christians in Gojra in 2009.

Hardly a year passes by without a major incident of arson and murder against members of religious minorities – Kot Radha Kishan near Kasur (2014), Larkana (2014), Joseph Colony, Lahore (2013) Gujranwala (2011), Gojra (2009) etc. These killers enjoy virtual immunity from the law.

Without building the capacity of the dilapidated systems of police and civil administration, and reforming the criminal justice system, incidents like Jhelum will keep occurring. It is only the fear of action by the military that has stopped people from taking even more extreme steps against minorities.

Email: adnanadilzaidi@gmail.com