Media Erasure, Anti-Shia Violence, and Counter-Narratives in Pakistan
Syeda Sana Batool
“Majority/Minority Politics in South Asia” is an essay collection, co-edited by Mohsin Bhat and Natasha Raheja, that moves beyond nation-specific frameworks to foster comparative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-border inquiry into how majoritarianism takes shape across South Asia. The collection illuminates shared mechanisms of majoritarian rule and the varied forms of opposition they provoke, thus advancing critical scholarship on democratic erosion while contributing to public debates on resisting authoritarianism and rebuilding democratic futures.
In Pakistani newsrooms, sectarian identity is often treated as a contaminant. It is something to be handled carefully, mentioned obliquely, or removed altogether. Newspaper editors in Pakistan describe this practice as “restraint,” a professional ethic meant to preserve social harmony. To name a sect, they argue, is to risk inflaming passions, to turn reporting into provocation. Over time, this caution has hardened into routine.
This routine produces not neutrality but a patterned silence. Acts of violence that are explicitly sectarian in motive are repeatedly stripped of the identities that might make them legible. Shia Muslims are killed, yet rarely named. Their deaths are absorbed into the language of terrorism, instability, or crime, categories that promise universality and erase specificity. In this framing, victims become interchangeable citizens and violence appears detached from the histories and ideologies that shape it.
This essay traces how such silences are produced and sustained in Pakistan’s news media, and what they make possible. It asks how the language of “responsible reporting” comes to function as a technology of erasure, how sectarian violence is recoded as “anti-state” disruption, and how this recoding protects the national image while obscuring unequal vulnerability. It also explores how Shia communities respond to this erasure by building their own archives and collective memory, using digital media to name their dead. Where the public record fragments, these archives insist on continuity.
In Pakistan, majority and minority are not neutral terms. Once religious identity is codified in law, minority status becomes less a matter of numbers than a condition of exposure. It shapes whose deaths are mourned publicly, whose suffering is considered speakable, and whose grief must remain private in the name of peace.
Framing Violence
To understand the news media’s patterned silence, it is necessary to look at how violence is reported. When Shia Muslims are massacred, the events are never framed as sectarian persecution, but rather as terrorism, urban crime, or instability. An explosion at an imambargah (a Shia Muslim place of worship) becomes an attack on a mosque. A bus massacre where passengers are separated by Shia names before being executed becomes terrorism on a highway. Between 2012 and 2015, a sustained campaign of assassinations targeted Shia doctors, lawyers, and academics in Karachi. News sources counted these murders in daily crime tallies as “target killings,” with no mention that every name on the list belonged to the same religious minority.
Through such framing, media outlets detach violence from motive and history, making repeated attacks appear incidental rather than targeted. Violence appears random rather than patterned, episodic rather than structural. This framing redirects responsibility away from ideology and toward abstract threats, allowing the conditions that make certain bodies vulnerable to remain unexamined.
One of the most common media strategies is securitization. A securitized framing folds anti-Shia violence into the language of national security, where the central question is not why people were targeted but how order will be restored. After eleven Hazara coal miners were kidnapped, tortured, and executed in Machh, Balochistan, local headlines described the incident as an attack on miners. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility, citing sectarian motives. Yet the media narrative recast the victims as generic laborers caught in a tragedy that could have happened to anyone. The terrorism frame invited audiences to focus on counter-terrorism operations rather than on the ideology that had selected these particular victims.
Post-9/11 security architecture intensifies this framing. Once violence is narratable as terrorism, it travels easily across national and global circuits. But that legibility comes at a cost. Sectarian ideology recedes into the background, and minority death becomes collateral within an endless security narrative rather than a targeted politics of elimination.
Sometimes, even naming sectarian identity can be folded back into the state project. A victim may be identified as Shia only to be absorbed into a performance of pluralism or condolence, while the conditions that made them killable remain untouched. Recognition, in such moments, becomes management. It allows the state to appear inclusive without confronting the infrastructures that organize unequal vulnerability.
Euphemism further flattens sectarian violence. Terms like sectarian strife or sectarian clashes suggest symmetry, masking the one-sided nature of most anti-Shia attacks. During Karachi’s wave of targeted killings, headlines blandly reported a surge in violence, implying gang wars or political score-settling rather than ideological assassinations. Such language erases power imbalances in the name of preserving the comfort of neutrality.
Teun van Dijk’s concept of the ideological square helps explain why this pattern persists. In-group virtues are highlighted, and out-group vices emphasized; in-group wrongs are downplayed, and out-group virtues minimized. In Pakistan, the Sunni majority and the state occupy the in-group position. This is not a coordinated pact, nor does Sunni identity in itself explain violence.
Instead, silencing is produced through institutional routines and risk management: what editors know will pass without consequence, what will trigger pressure from officials, and what may invite retaliation from violent actors. Sectarian militants, when acknowledged at all, are described as criminals or “anti-state elements” rather than products of a broader ideological environment. Naming their sectarian identity would implicate the majority and disrupt the comfort of collective innocence.
Editors and officials often justify this omission as a matter of harmony. What goes unspoken is how the label anti-state functions as a political technology. It allows the state to treat sectarian killing as an external disruption rather than violence that has grown alongside, and sometimes through, the state’s own security, religious, and regulatory infrastructures. The state appears simultaneously as victim and rescuer, while the structural question of who benefits from sectarian ordering slips out of view.
The cost of this discretion is borne entirely by the minority, asked to suffer quietly for the sake of unity.
Islamization, Security, and Impunity
This editorial caution is not merely a product of newsroom culture. It is rooted in the ideological history of the Pakistani state. The foundations were laid during General Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime (1977–1988), when Pakistan underwent aggressive Islamization along conservative Sunni lines. Shia mobilization in this period, including mass protests over jurisprudence and taxation, was treated as a threat to Zia’s Sunni-Islamist project.
In response, the regime cultivated and empowered virulently anti-Shia groups such as Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, supported by external funding and embedded in expanding madrasa networks. Public denunciations of Shias as heretics became more common, sectarian rhetoric entered electoral politics, and religious difference hardened into state infrastructures. From these networks emerged Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which would wage a relentless campaign of bombings, shootings, and assassinations against Shias through the 1990s and 2000s. Thousands were killed. In Quetta, Hazara Shias were besieged, attacked in markets, buses, and even cemeteries.
The point is not simply that Zia’s rule led to today’s violence, but that it reconfigured what became politically thinkable and materially possible. Sectarian groups endured through patronage, funding streams, and a culture of impunity that made targeted violence a low-risk instrument of power. In the present, language may have shifted to counter-terrorism, but the public story still renders sectarian murder as background noise rather than as part of how the state governs borders, dissent, and belonging.
Violence was also compounded by impunity. Figures implicated in dozens of murders were repeatedly acquitted while witnesses were intimidated or killed. This signaled to perpetrators that there would be few consequences, and to victims that their lives were expendable.
Journalists understood the risk of reporting on sectarian violence. Naming sectarian actors could invite not only militant retaliation but also scrutiny from institutions invested in keeping these issues muted. Silence became a survival strategy as much as an editorial one.
When violence disappears from the historical record, it robs victims not only of justice but of belonging. Their deaths become isolated incidents, not history.
In 1963, the Therhi massacre in Sindh left more than a hundred Shias dead during Ashura processions. The violence vanished almost immediately from national memory. No one was punished.
Over decades, similar episodes have followed the same trajectory: brief outrage within the community, minimal coverage, then rapid disappearance. Each erasure compounds the next, making sectarian violence appear perpetually new and therefore perpetually unaccountable. Erasing Shia identity from narratives of violence sustains the myth of sectarian harmony while committing a second violence: denying a marginalized group the ability to represent its own suffering.
Memory, Space, and Counter-Narratives
Sectarian violence is not evenly distributed. Hazara Shias in Balochistan have been targeted by especially systematic mass violence, while Shias in Kurram, including Parachinar, have endured prolonged conflict. Urban centers like Karachi have seen waves of targeted killings of Shia professionals.
Sectarianism also has a spatial grammar. It is written into routes, neighborhoods, and the everyday geography of risk: the road a bus takes, the market a community avoids, the enclave that becomes both refuge and trap. What appears as random terrorism in headlines often maps onto these patterned geographies of exposure.
Silence, however, rarely has the final word. When dominant institutions are erased, communities respond by building their own archives. In Pakistan, Shia communities increasingly turn to digital tools to document violence and preserve memory. The Shaheed Foundation Pakistan, founded in the 1990s, has evolved from a support organization into a living archive. Its Martyrdom Archive records names, photographs, dates, and locations of Shias killed in targeted attacks. It insists on specificity where the mainstream media insists on generality.
On social media, Shia activists operate as their own news network. Within hours of an attack, victims’ names and images circulate with sectarian motives stated plainly. Hashtags such as #ShiaGenocide force the visibility that domestic media withholds.
In January 2021, when Hazara families in Quetta refused to bury their dead until the prime minister visited, images of women and children sitting beside coffins travelled globally. The message was unmistakable: this was not generic terrorism, but the deliberate targeting of a community.
These counter-archives are more than just appeals for recognition. They are inward-facing projects of community, faith, and political imagination. They refuse to reduce life to injury alone. By naming loss while insisting on continuity, they reclaim narrative authority over how Shia life and death are remembered.
In undertaking this work, Shia communities engage in counter-memory: practices that preserve what official narratives attempt to erase. In the digital realm, the subaltern speaks in its own voice, linking together attacks that headlines portray as isolated and refusing to allow either perpetrators or the state to dictate which stories are worth telling. Archiving becomes political authorship.
The struggle over who is visible, mourned, and remembered in Pakistan is ultimately a struggle over democracy itself. Erasing Shia identity from news reports of violence is not an attempt to avoid tension; it is a way of controlling the story of the nation. Counter-narratives challenge this monopoly. They insist that peace built on erasure is no peace at all, that unity without truth is brittle and false.
Memory here is not only resistance. It is a demand for a different political future. A nation that cannot name its dead cannot protect its living.
Syeda Sana Batool is an Assistant Professor of Visual Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her work engages with visual culture, anthropology, and contemporary social questions. She is also interested in AI-augmented memory, examining how emerging technologies shape the ways people archive, revisit, and make meaning from lived experience, inheritance, and collective history.
Thumbnail credits: "Karachi from above" by Bilalhassan88 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Prepared with the editorial assistance of Mishaal Mahmood.