(Bloomberg) -- For years, Priyantha Kumara Diyawadanage walked a fine line as the manager of a sportswear factory in Pakistan. His employees were mostly young Muslim men, some devoutly religious. He was an outsider: a Christian from Sri Lanka and one of the few foreigners employed in the city of Sialkot, the world's largest producer of footballs.
In December, simmering tension erupted into a full-throated mob attack. A rumor spread that Diyawadanage took down posters with Islamic verses. Malik Adnan, another manager, tried to hold back an angry crowd, reminding them their boss could not read Urdu. Then “the mob got massive and overpowered us,” he said.
Scores of employees chased Diyawadanage onto the factory's roof. Within minutes, they stoned him to death, according to videos of the incident. “Punishment for the blasphemer! Chop his head off!” the crowd shouted as they set his corpse on fire.
The brutal incident at Rajco Industries has roiled Pakistan's power corridors, drawing swift condemnation from leaders of all backgrounds and raising questions for Prime Minister Imran Khan, whose vision of a progressive “New Pakistan” has often clashed with his links to conservative religious forces.
It has also punctuated a dangerous trend increasingly noticed by politicians in Pakistan: More ordinary citizens are becoming radicalized in conjunction with the rise of fundamentalist leaders and the revival of colonial-era blasphemy laws. While data is sparse on vigilante murders in particular, a number of high-profile attacks in recent months have attracted widespread media attention.
Several weeks after Diyawadanage, 48, was killed, a Christian preacher was gunned down in Peshawar, one of Pakistan's oldest cities. Last month, Mohammad Mushtaq Ahmed, who hailed from a remote village in Punjab, was beaten to death and hung from a tree after he was accused of burning pages of the Koran inside a mosque.
Hasaan Khawar, a spokesperson for Punjab's chief minister, said such attacks have become more frequent over the years, with indoctrination made easier in the internet age. “If you ask me if we're doing enough, the answer is no,” said Khawar, a member of Khan's political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. “We must condemn the incidents with one voice. We must be clear that they cannot happen in Pakistan. This is a red line.”
Failing to quell religious vigilantism could have disastrous consequences for Pakistan, an Islamic nation of more than 200 million. Since last year, when the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, Pakistan has reported a surge in terrorist attacks from local militant outfits emboldened by developments next door.
Economically, the European Parliament raised the prospect of suspending Pakistan's preferential trade access if the country fails to crack down on homegrown extremism. International isolation would greatly hinder Pakistan's ability to repay billions of dollars to lenders including China, which has aggressively invested in the country to counter India's hegemony in South Asia.
Khan, an urbane former cricketer who assumed office in 2018, promised voters that Pakistan would emulate China's growth story by providing jobs to a young population and lifting millions out of poverty. But he's also shown deference to the military and cut deals with Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose support he needs as he faces more pressure over a struggling economy.
In a statement, Farrukh Habib, Pakistan's junior information minister, said Khan's administration has strengthened protections for religious minorities and repudiated “extremism in all forms and manifestations.” He denied that attacks in Sialkot or elsewhere reflected a problem in Pakistan.
“These isolated incidents did not have any state-sponsorship or support from the masses in our society,” he said.
Amid a national outcry over Diyawadanage's lynching, Khan condemned the “horrific vigilante attack” and promised justice for his family. Still, some have accused his administration of playing both sides. Though dozens of people were arrested, Pervez Khattak, Pakistan's defense minister, characterized the incident as an inevitability of youth, telling a reporter: “Some boys gathered, they chanted slogans in favor of Islam, they got carried away by emotions. This happens among kids, fights take place and even murders.”
Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistan ambassador to the U.S., said the government has increasingly adopted “the default position, which in Pakistan is to support punishing blasphemers, even if violently and unlawfully.”
“Khan's religious rhetoric and his statements that the West must understand why Muslims get angry over blasphemy instead of unequivocally condemning violence has not helped,” said Haqqani, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington.
Pakistan's blasphemy laws, which condone capital punishment for anyone convicted of affronting Islam, are a particularly sharp thorn. Mostly forgotten after the British carved up the subcontinent during Partition, the laws are now increasingly applied not just to Pakistan's religious minorities, but also to settle disputes between Muslims, activists say. Broad public support makes defanging them contentious.
Though difficult to track, at least 1,949 people have been charged with blasphemy over the last 35 years, according to the Center for Social Justice, an agency that documents human rights abuses in Pakistan. The number of cases between 2017 and 2021 was a third higher than the preceding five years.
A report from the U.S. Department of State highlighted the trend, noting that 2020 saw the largest number of blasphemy cases since tracking began, citing local non-governmental organizations. Courts are often unforgiving: In January, a Muslim woman was convicted of denigrating the Prophet Muhammed in text messages and sentenced to death.
“Terrorists might have been defeated on the battlefield, but the ideology remains in the minds, that extremist ideology still exists,” said Qibla Ayaz, the chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology, a government body that provides legal advice on religious issues to Pakistani officials. “There is no doubt.”
Support for religious vigilantism in Pakistan rose after a liberal politician named Salman Taseer was assassinated by his bodyguard in 2011. Taseer had denounced the harsh legal punishment of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad.
A personality cult formed around the bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri. His supporters started Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, an Islamic fundamentalist party. After Qadri was hanged for murder in 2016, they turned his grave into a shrine.
The ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf has struggled to reign in the country's fringes. Though Labbaik's leaders hold only a few legislative seats — and none in the nation's 342-seat national assembly — the party has expansive influence on the ground.
In 2020, after a teacher was beheaded in France for supposedly showing students a blasphemous cartoon, Labbaik organized protests and demanded the expulsion of the French ambassador. The government banned the party and Khan authorized force to disperse crowds. But the military — a key powerbroker in Pakistan — opposed it, Dawn and other local news outlets reported. Last year, officials ultimately relented and allowed Labbaik to hold rallies again.
The tumult crescendoed on Dec. 3, when Diyawadanage was killed at Rajco Industries, a sportswear manufacturer founded in the 1930s.
In the weeks since the attack, administrators fixed surveillance cameras and added a dozen security officers to patrol the factory. The city hired scholars to give lectures to workers on the rights of minorities under Islam. Labbaik also distanced itself from the lynching, though witnesses said members of the mob chanted slogans associated with the party.
In Sri Lanka, Diyawadanage's family has resisted blanket condemnations. Earlier this year, during a memorial at Pakistan's high commission in Colombo, his wife, Nilushi, appealed for compassion. “I raise my children not to hate people who killed their father,” she told the crowd.
But Adnan, the manager who tried to intervene, was pessimistic that much would change around Sialkot, or in Pakistan more broadly, as long as a culture of intolerance persisted.
“Even if you attend the funeral of and sympathize with the victim of such an incident,” he said, “people rise and question you.”
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
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