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How Gilgit-Baltistan has undergone a sectarian ‘Sunnification’!

In contrast to its past (mostly) harmonious religious history, Gilgit-Baltistan has in recent decades become another space for a sectarian divide and has undergone a process of a sectarian Sunnification......

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In contrast to its past (mostly) harmonious religious history, Gilgit-Baltistan has in recent decades become another space for a sectarian divide and has undergone a process of a sectarian Sunnification……

Gilgit-BaltistanOne of the most defining differences between Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistani provinces is the numerical predominance of Shias over Sunnis. Shia-dominated areas (or States) are a rarity in the Islamic world given that around 85% of the global Muslim population identifies as Sunni (Council on Foreign Relations). The historically complex Shia-Sunni relations have been further complicated by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I, which caused the emergence of new, ethnically diverse Nation-States, most of which were predominantly Sunni, and even in States such as Bahrain and Kuwait, where Shias are the demographic majority, they are ruled by Sunni minority governments (Freer, 2019).

The emergence of new Nation-States in the Middle East and South Asia and the often failed attempts of nation-building have helped to intensify and internationalize the sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shias, integrating sectarian issues into interstate relations and the relations between intra-State and cross-border communities. The international dimension of this conflict is exemplified by the competing geopolitical designs of Iran and Saudi-Arabia/the United Arab Emirates for the Middle East and the Islamic world more generally, with each sectarian side supporting a variety of non-State actors throughout the region (Latham, 2020).

Although pre-colonial Gilgit-Baltistan was certainly exceptional for its time regarding the extent of ethno-religious harmony and diversity it displayed, it was never fully free of the social conflict that often accompanies various forms of cross-community diversity. Sections of locals had been opposed to being ruled by a Hindu Dogra, sectarian disputes along Shia-Sunni lines had already been noted by British colonial officers, and oral history in Gilgit town especially attributes the institutional separation of Shias and Sunnis to the policies of Sardar Mohammad Akbar Khan, who was governor of Kashmir in the outgoing 19th century (Grieser & Sökefeld, 2015). Khan, a Muslim, was instructed in 1898 by the Maharajah to erect a Hindu temple in the center of Gilgit, but Khan defied his orders, rather asking his workers to construct a mosque for both Shias and Sunnis to pray in (Grieser & Sökefeld, 2015). Whilst the historical record remains vague as to why both communities stopped praying together in the years and decades to come (Grieser and Sökefeld, 2015), both groups appeared to become more spatially and ritually separate in their religious practices in the first decades of the 20th century.

To some extent, this increasing temporal divergence in religious codes correlated to the connectivity impact of colonization as the British investment into regional transport and trade networks allowed religious communities to deepen their connection further with larger host communities abroad as it enabled Shias to travel to Iran and Sunnis to Iraq and Central Asia, thus shaping religious ideals in a way that were aligned with the way religion was practiced in these regions, which often came at the expense of regionalized communal harmony and local forms of interaction (Dad, 2016). By 1960, interreligious marriages had decreased in pertinence due to increased sectarian disagreements about religious practices such as the slaughtering of animals, slowly dissolving the local-traditional social fabric that had previously connected religious communities (Grieser & Sökefeld, 2015). Despite these conflicts, Nosheen Ali (2013), an anthropologist from New York University narrates, the years prior to the 1970s are remembered in Gilgit-Baltistan as times of religious and cultural fluidity and plurality, with people of different backgrounds displaying significant overlaps in their respective “life-worlds” (p. 103).

Gilgit-BaltistanIn the early 1970s, the Federal Government began to implement a series of policies that went on to change the demographic constitution of Gilgit-Baltistan and altered the politics pertaining to sectarian-religious belonging and identity. Demographic-topographical shifts in Gilgit-Baltistan had begun to occur as early as 1963 when according to the Sino-Pakistani Agreement, Pakistan ceded a significant portion of Gilgit-Baltistan to China. Naturally, due to its constitutional status, Gilgit-Baltistan was neither made part of the negotiations nor the final agreement, further splitting up the cultural space to which it used to lay claim. A legally and demographically even more defining moment in recent Gilgit-Baltistan history was the abrogation of State Subject Rule in 1974 by the PPP government of PM Ali Bhutto. Comparable to the Indian Administered Jammu & Kashmir-related Article 35 in India’s Constitution, modified by the Modi administration in 2019, State Subject Rule in Gilgit-Baltistan had been implemented by the Maharajah of Jammu & Kashmir in 1927 and sought to limit the influx of foreigners into Jammu & Kashmir and its subsidiary states by making it illegal for foreigners to purchase land in the region (Pandya, 2020). Bhutto’s abrogation of State Subject Rule enabled non-Shia Muslims to migrate to Gilgit-Baltistan, which marked an active attempt by the government in Islamabad to Sunnify the Shia-dominated region and highlights an ethnocentric approach towards nation-building by the Pakistani elite (Sering, 2014). This is also reflected in the fact that syllabi and school books started to be published in Urdu, which eroded traditional scripts and partially made cultural messages and codes illegible, thus further undermining local cultures and their historical legacies (Sering, 2014).

According to Abbas Kazmi, a famous Balti author, “To wear our traditional clothes or even to speak Balti is considered a sign of backwardness. We dress and eat like the Punjabis even though many of their customs are just as foreign to as those from the West” (in Sering, 2014, p. 65). In lieu of these historical distinctions, however, the State went on to push Punjabis and Pashtuns into the region, and while Gilgit-Baltistan was 85% Shia or Shia Ismaili in 1948, this number dropped rapidly after 1974, with Shias and Ismailis now making up around 50% of Gilgit-Baltistan’s population (Rubin, 2019). Rather than a process of ethnic cleansing, then, such a development can be conceptualized as ethnic flooding, referring to a process in which a space is “flooded” with non-locals to change its demographic structure (Ganguly, 2020).

Crucially, this political development reflects the increased re-organization of Pakistani politics along sectarian lines in the 1970s, which is further embodied by the 1974 declaration by Bhutto’s government that the Ahmadiyya community was no longer to be considered Muslim, a bow to the political pressure of the Sunni extremist clergy (Hunzai, 2013). Indeed, the Sunnification of Pakistan and the sectarianization of Gilgit-Baltistan marks not necessarily the Islamization of Pakistan (given that the vast majority of Pakistan already adhered to some rendition of Islam), but the neo-Islamization of the country, conceptually referring to “a process intended to turn ‘nominal’ Muslims into ‘good’, observant Muslims”, with the respective parameters of acceptability being delineated by the dominant Islamic community (Grieser & Sökefeld, 2015, p. 86). The abrogation of State Subject Rule in 1974 inevitably facilitated the increased influx of Sunnis and non-locals to Gilgit-Baltistan, and locals and non-Sunnis in particular began to discern the influx of Punjabi language and culture as a threat to their cultural and linguistic heritage (Bansal, 2008).

Gilgit-BaltistanFollowing the abrogation of State Subject Rule, the first violent regional clashes occurred in 1975 when Sunnis fired at a Shia congregation commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in Gilgit city (Grieser & Sökefeld, 2015). To protect their co-religionists, an angry Shia mob formed and marched towards Gilgit city, where it encountered Sunni counter-protesters. An escalation of the violence was prevented by local paramilitaries, who managed to diffuse the situation under the condition that Shias would not gather in front of the Sunni mosque to celebrate Muharram, which culminated in the increased alienation of the Shia community from the local authorities (Grieser & Sökefeld, 2015). Although ethno-nationalist independence movements such as the Balawaristan National Front had started to emerge as early as the 1960s, the formation of political parties seeking more autonomy for Gilgit-Baltistan accelerated in these early stages of sectarian conflict. Over time, however, most of those movements were absorbed into grander, nation-wide parties without having achieved their goal of greater autonomy, and the struggle for independence for Gilgit-Baltistan has gradually disappeared from the political mainstream in the region (Dad, 2016), with the political emphasis now being on the attainment of basic human and political rights.

The contemporary situation in Gilgit-Baltistan has been profoundly shaped by the political implications of the 1977 military coup d’état that saw General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq dispose PM Bhutto, who was executed in 1979. The rise of Zia-ul-Haq also illuminates the close connection between the military establishment and fundamentalist religious belief, which, Kathy Gannon (2020) writing for The Diplomat, prevails until today: “Successive military and democratically elected governments have buckled to the pressure of Islamic extremists, who critics say terrorize with their ability to bring impassioned mobs on to the street”. Zia-ul-Haq was a fundamentalist at heart, juxtaposing Bhutto’s comparatively liberal constitutional outlook by introducing Sharia law as the country’s defining legal framework, Islamizing the educational curriculums, investing into new Sunni-orthodox Madrassas across Pakistan, filling judicial, bureaucratic and military positions with religious hardliners, and supporting legal bodies such as the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), which continues to shape Pakistani policy-making (Shams, 2016). Supported by the Gulf States, led by Saudi Arabia, Zia-ul-Haq pursued a Wahhabization of Pakistan (others (Hoodbhoy, 2017) have referred to this as the ‘Saudization’ of Pakistan), introducing anti-Shia penal codes that were comparable to those of Riyadh and lending support to the Sunni campaign of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the invading Soviet forces, framing the fight as a Jihad against the Soviet atheists (Hunzai, 2013). Although Zia-ul-Haq died in a plane crash in 1988, the political impact of his reign prevails: according to Majid Siddiqui, a journalist based in Karachi, “He [ul-Haq] used religion as a tool to strengthen his power. […] Today’s Pakistan is a reflection of Zia-ul Haq’s policies, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to get rid of it” (qtd. in Shams, 2016). The Wahhabization of Pakistan under Zia-ul-Haq also informed Pakistan’s relations with other Muslim States, intensifying Pakistan’s security investment in regional conflicts, deepening religious ties with Sunni hardliners in the Gulf, and jeopardizing relations with Iran; in the early 1990s, the Iranian diplomat Sadiq Ganji was assassinated in Lahore, and in 1997, Pakistani assailants killed five members of the Iranian Air Force in Rawalpindi (Kumar, 2008). The Zia-ul-Haq years were subsequently of decisive relevance for Pakistan as a country, reinforcing and institutionally entrenching some of the fundamentalist elements that had been present since the country’s birth in 1947 on a both domestic and interstate level.

Although the process of neo-Islamization of Pakistan commenced prior to Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship, the process of Sunnification and Wahhabization hit Gilgit-Baltistan particularly severely, whilst the successful 1979 Shia revolution in Iran and Afghan crisis of the 1980s further contributed to the sectarianization of relations in Gilgit-Baltistan. Zia-ul-Haq utilized religious fault lines to vindicate the Jihad in Afghanistan, sectarianize the Jammu & Kashmir conflict, and implement an anti-Shia version of Sharia law that amplified the sense of alienation that had already been prevalent prior in Gilgit-Baltistan. In addition to this, Zia-ul-Haq helped to fund several domestic Sunni groups, for instance Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), which operated on an explicit anti-Shia platform (Hunzai, 2013) and gained an armed wing in 1996 with the creation of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). Gilgit-BaltistanResponding to this surge in anti-Shia sentiment, Shias themselves began to form Shia self-defense groups such as Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Fiqah-e-Jafaria (TNFJ) and Sipah-e-Mohammed Pakistan (SMP), (Azam & Iqbal, 2017). Adding fuel to the fire, the late 1980s and the victory of the Mujahideen over Soviet forces in Afghanistan saw the increased return of highly radicalized and well-trained fighters to Pakistan, many of whom found new employment in radical anti-Shia groups upon their return, further heightening the potential for violence. At the same time, the Iranian revolution in 1979 had allowed many Shias to travel abroad to Iran to undergo religious training, and many of these radicalized Shias returned around the same time and, comparable to other Shia militant groups, were backed by Iran with funding and arms (Shay, 2020). In conjunction with an already loaded sectarian atmosphere, these political developments rendered the relations with Shias and Sunnis in Pakistan a powder keg that was only waiting to explode.

The escalation of sectarian violence, stimulated by government policy and regional terrorism, occurred in 1988, when Shias in Gilgit city began to celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr, the sighting of the moon, but were attacked by Sunnis, whose religious leaders had not yet sighted the moon (Shekhawat, 2011). Sectarian violence escalated initially and then died down again, but after four days, the situation escalated again due to the arrival of 80,000 Pakistani and Afghan fighters that had been sent by the government to “teach the Shias a lesson” for their insubordination (Shekhawat, 2011). These Lashkars went on to kill and rape hundreds of Shias in Gilgit-Baltistan, destroyed Shia property and religious sites throughout the region, and forcibly ‘converted’ Shias in villages where they were a minority (Sering, 2014). Paramilitary forces had been present throughout this chaotic time but did not intervene to aid the local Shias, and the Lashkars that had engaged in this process of ethnic cleansing were later transported out of Gilgit-Baltistan under the supervision of the government, with no one being held accountable for the crimes they had committed (Sering, 2014), illustrating how politics and security were increasingly organized along sectarian lines.

Following this escalation of violence, anti-Sunni sentiments hardened, and the ensuing years are locally known as the “tension years” in which the execution of sectarian violence by one side (for example against a Sunni leader by Shias or vice versa) would escalate into new flare-ups of retributive violence (Grieser & Sökefeld, 2015). Whilst the 1988 riots had very immediate detrimental implications for regional harmony by further stipulating violence, they have also fundamentally altered the sense of identification and community in Gilgit-Baltistan; as Grieser and Sökefeld (2015) contend, the understanding of individual and communal identity is inextricably coupled with sectarian identities as “it is impossible to think and to act without taking one’s own and other’s sectarian affiliation into account. In an atmosphere of perceived general insecurity, to differentiate between Shia and Sunni became regarded as vital” (p. 89). The 1999 Kargil War between Pakistan and India deepened this further as Pakistan employed anti-Shia fighters alongside its regular armed forces, with many Gilgit-BaltistanState-backed militant organizations establishing training camps on Gilgit-Baltistan’s territory, increasing the number of regionally present Sunni-militants and making arms readily available for a variety of organizations (Shekhawat, 2011). Although then-President Pervez Musharraf announced a crackdown on terrorist groups in 2005 following a surge in international diplomatic pressure, this has not decisively reduced the terrorist presence in the region (Saeed et al., 2014), rather mitigating the political control the government used to possess over these terrorist outfits. Besides this, the extension of State control in the region under the cloak of counter-terrorism operations also vindicated the intensified inductions of ethnic Punjabis and Pashtuns in the region by Musharraf’s government (Bansal, 2014). In this general sectarianization of social relations and conflict, the region became militarized in the following years, and efforts to reduce sectarian violence, for instance through the segregation of public transport, have not aided in alleviating the social and cultural grievances that lay at the root of local conflict.

The repeated occurrence of sectarian violence from both sides, both within Gilgit-Baltistan and within Pakistan more generally, thus invites violent retributions in a vicious cycle of violence that is unlikely to stop without significant concessions and political reforms that genuinely address the grievances of local groups. Religious violence continues to flare up until this day, and the stronghold of extremism over Gilgit-Baltistan has further marginalized the region, undermining its economic potential.

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