I was reading a news yesterday that in some place in Pakistan a man was killed by a mob by breaking into a police station...yes..a police station.
My question to educated Pakistanis who reside in Pakistan Is : Does all this lawlessness,poverty,corruption,terrorism,economic bankruptcy ,illiteracy and ignorance ,religious fanaticism drive you crazy? Doesn't it push you into deep depression?
I was asking myself this question when I read. that news...What would I do if I were an average pakistani? If I have the means I would leave Pakistan .Yes,personally I wouldn't like to leave my motherland..but what alternative do I have? I can't raise my voice against military...I can't discuss religion with logic...I can't help curb terrorism...there is nothing I could do.A foreign country can never be mine or of my descendants no matter how many years I live there but at least I can escape the depression and helplessness and provide my children a better environment to grow in.
Pakistan is divided into 3 broad tiers:
1. The true elite -- i.e., the politicians, generals, judges, top bureaucrats, etc.
2. The middle class -- i.e., junior-to-mid-level military, urban professionals, doctors, etc. This is a broad group as it'd also include a 'lower middle class' and an 'upper poor class' depending on various factors. In general, I'd say any Pakistani with a shot at acquiring an education would fall into this group. So, the child of an army jawan would be in this group, if not now then eventually.
3. The disenfranchised poor -- i.e., the majority of the population who we generally don't care about, much or at all. These are Pakistanis we'd visually see around, but we in tiers 1 and 2 are indifferent to them.
What tends to happen is that the people within tier-1 will use the people in tier-3 in various ways, e.g., for cheap labor, farming, and -- when things get dicey -- mob violence. This is where you get those violent protests and stuff, for example.
Now, after many years of the tier-1 group downloading black money, drugs, guns, and degeneracy to tier-3, you're going to end up with a lot of messed up people. So, when there's a conflict among people within tier-3, especially if one side is an ethnic or religious minority, then the chances of mob lynching and the like go up.
However, the persecution at that level (against the minority) isn't state-sanctioned, or even supported by any of the political parties (including our right-wing parties and entities). It's a by-product of the work by the tier-1s.
Rather, the tier-1 group had used tier-3 people as dogs and armed them with both violent tendencies and low IQ thinking. So, when a 'big thug' rises among the tier-3s (or a tier-2 decides to become a 'big thug'), the tier-3s will rally around that thug because that's how tier-1s have conditioned them. If the 'big thug' raises the Communist flag, then I assure you, he'll have followers for no reason except that he is the alpha dog in his pack.
This is basically how the TTP emerged. Yes, the TTP has relatively few tier-1s (versus the other strata of Pakistani society), but they have a lot of 'big thugs' (from tier-2s and tier-3s) in their ranks. So, when those 'big thugs' make the call, the tier-3 minions come.
The closest things to BJP and RSS-style collusion and systemic persecution in Pakistan are in Sindh. In Sindh, there's a stronger ethnic-nationalist bent and, in turn, the PPP is tied to ethnocentric voices and actors. In turn, those actors work to take control of resources, define a narrative (about how Karachi "should be"), and other measures.
So, ethnic fighting between different groups -- especially in Sindh -- could be more broad-based (by involving people from tier-1 to tier-2 to tier-3). However, when some random poor person gets burned for being a minority, I wouldn't say there's an organized connection to the top as, in general, Pakistan's tier-1s don't have an interest in that sort of thing.
We can accuse our political and military elites of
a lot of things, like
a lot...but intentional and implicit hate against religious minorities isn't one of them. They're pretty blind to that stuff.
The closest would be JUI or MMA, but for them, the issue is about instituting a dhimmi-type system upon religious minorities. Yet, even in that sense, there's no vision of expelling religious minorities or expunging their presence in Pakistan (as that'd violate Islamic texts).
All that said, if we tier-2s (most Pakistanis on this forum are tier-2s) speak out against the tier-1s, then the tier-1s will send their minions from among the tier-3s on us. In Karachi, you had some tier-1s and tier-2s collude to form their counterforce -- i.e., MQM -- and that ends up in even bigger problems.