TWENTY people killed in order to ‘cleanse’ them of their worldly afflictions. It is difficult to recall when the country, brimming as it does with people pursuing spiritual purity or combating all kinds of guilt via various routes, last experienced a similar incident of this magnitude. The mass murder that took place on Friday in Sargodha — though discovered by police on Sunday — at the hands of a shrine custodian and his accomplices, brings a number of ugly aspects to the fore: superstition, isolation from society, patronage of influentials. One may well include intelligence failure in the list, for most ignorant is a law-enforcement set-up that is unaware of what is happening for such long hours at a place potentially as heady as a shrine.

It is never too difficult for a clever individual anywhere to convince a few of those around of the need to clean up their souls but Pakistan’s social system facilitates such extreme steps by not doing enough to expose its citizens to the help they so desperately need in terms of their physical and mental well-being. Poverty is an issue in many cases, although this latest instance reconfirms that when it comes to matters of belief, even the supposedly educated can easily fall prey to overwhelming madness. The spiritual side to this story might never be known fully — 20-odd people offering themselves up slave-like, in total submission, in such a manner is a riddle unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved. For the time being, a theory has been tentatively put forward which hints at some succession row at the Ali Mohammad Qalandar shrine where the incident took place, and which may have played a role — given that the spiritual and material often go hand in hand in this business. That said, it is shocking to realise that the man who confessed, did so with an apparent sense of security that he will not or cannot be held accountable for his blood-curdling act. This sense of safety could only come from a real or imaginary immunity from punishment. Although that is an indictment of everyone around, practicality demands that the follow-up also include asking questions of those responsible under the system. How could the police not get a whiff of what was happening at the shrine? And where were the other routine minders, like the local government representatives, while the shrine was being bathed in human blood?

Published in Dawn, April 4th, 2017