According to daily Dawn, a group of activists and researchers, namely Sarah Hank, Ali Jafri, Seher Haider, Shayan Rajani, Haider Raza, Shahana Rajani, Fahad Desmukh and Rubab Karrar have launched an interactive website that supposedly documents and visualises trends in sectarian violence in Pakistan from 2002 to 2013.

They claim that the website, Tashaddud.org, plots the historical data of sectarian killings on an interactive map which can be filtered by city and by year. The website also represents the violence on timelines and through a qualitative highlighting of human interest stories.

The project came into being at a “hackathon” held in September at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. Its liaison in Pakistan is Shayan Rajani, according to whom: “There is a growing consensus today that sectarian violence is a major issue in Pakistan, yet we are strangely without a clear understanding of the actual depth, scale and history of this violence. Major instances of violence are covered in the media and then lost sight of as other incidents grab our attention.”

However, one feels compelled to say that while some, as according to Mr. Rajani, might be unclear on the depth, scale and history of ‘this’ violence, Mr. Rajani himself has got the very term wrong. The website by using the wrong and highly misleading terminology of ‘sectarian violence’ and plotting the killings as committed by either ‘Sunni Militants’ and ‘Shia Militants’ adopts a false neutral stance and regurgitates the myth that what is transpiring in Pakistan is a tit-for-tat killings by opposing sects. The truth is starkly and clearly different, and needs to be said clearly and loudly: that Deobandi militants are killings Shias, as well as Sunni Barelvis, Ahmedis, Christians, Hindus and people from other religious backgrounds. It is a statistical fact that Deobandi militants, using various labels such as TTP, ASWJ, LeJ, JeM, Jundullah, Ahrar-ul-Hind etc, are target killing Shias, Sunni Barelvis, Christians, Hindus and Ahmadis due to their faith.

Instead of adopting a false neutral stance and presenting the situation as that of tit-for-tat sectarian violence, Mr. Rajani and team should carefully use the right words and choose the right side of this battle, or they should otherwise stop masquerading as rights activists if theirs too is simply a business venture.

One simply cannot be neutral when genocide is being carried out. More than 21,000 Shias and thousands of Sunni Barelvis have been massacred by Deobandi terrorists in the last few decades in Pakistan. By acting as false neutral, Mr. Rajani and his website might remain relevant to Pakistan’s cosmetic, elitist civil society, but they will be far from being seriously considered as serious activists working for the cause of the oppressed. For that, the first act they’ll have to perform is to doff the cloak of neutrality and call a spade a spade. They must stop using the misleading term of sectarian violence, and clearly identify the murderers of all Pakistanis of all faiths as Deobandi militants. They also need to engage with victim communities including Shia and Sunni Barelvi activists in order to give voice to their perspectives and concerns.

We hope that tashaddud.org will stop using the term sectarian violence adopt a more nuanced approach to the issue of Shia Genocide at the hands of Deobandi militants, who have been murdering people from other faiths and sects too.

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