The suicide bombing at the Khadija Tul Kubra Mosque in Islamabad on February 6, 2026, which killed at least 36 worshippers and left more than 160 injured during Friday prayers, was not merely another act of terrorism in Pakistan’s troubled history. It wasn’t an isolated tragedy either.
It was, in fact, part of a grim continuum. In November 2024, a Shia procession in Parachinar was attacked, killing 44 civilians, including women and children. In March 2022, the Islamic State–Khorasan Province (ISKP) bombed the Kucha Risaldar Shia Mosque in Peshawar, killing over 60 worshippers.
In 2015, a Shia Mosque in Shikarpur was targeted during Friday prayers, leaving 61 dead. Earlier still, the Hazara Shia community of Quetta endured near-genocidal violence, including the twin bombings of 2013 that killed over 200 people.
Pakistan today is home to more than 40 million Shia Muslims—nearly one-fifth of its population. Yet more than 4,000 Shias have been killed in sectarian attacks in the past two decades alone. These are not accidental casualties of instability; they are victims of a sustained ideological assault.
A state that cannot—or will not—protect such a large section of its Muslim population forfeits its claim to Islamic legitimacy.
The reasons for mass murders committed in the name of Islam lie not only in theology but also in governance. Pakistan has failed to act as a neutral guarantor of religious plurality. Instead, it has repeatedly aligned itself with extremist Sunni majoritarianism, allowing sectarian hatred to harden into political currency.
Legislative measures such as Punjab’s Tahaffuz-e-Bunyad-e-Islam Bill (2020) have further marginalised Shias by privileging a singular Sunni interpretation of Islam. Electoral expediency has repeatedly trumped constitutional responsibility. Extremists are not confronted; they are courted, because they deliver street power and votes.
The deeper question remains: how does such an ideology repeatedly find fertile ground in Pakistan?
The answer lies in the paradigm and developments preceding its birth in 1947. Subsequently, the Islamic state has waged repeated wars and exported Jehadi terror to undermine residual India. A state that once distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ terrorists should not feign surprise when violence turns inward. Islam, reduced to an instrument of power, inevitably devours its own.
Pakistan’s well-worn narrative in which India is portrayed as inherently anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic collapses under empirical scrutiny.
At the time of Partition, residual India had roughly 30 million Muslims. Today, that number exceeds 220-240 million, making India home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the world.
India maintains strong relations with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, and other Islamic nations. Even under Prime Minister Narendra Modi—frequently caricatured by Pakistani propaganda—India’s engagement with the Islamic world has deepened. Pakistan’s accusation is not grounded in reality; it is an ideological necessity to sustain its founding hostility.
Contrast this with Pakistan, where non-Muslims and non-Sunni Muslims, including Ahmadiyas, have been reduced to statistical insignificance, treated as second-class citizens, and are virtually invisible in the country’s public spaces.
Pakistan’s antagonism towards India is both theological and civilisational. Pakistan was conceived not as a cultural continuation but as a negation of the subcontinent’s pre-Islamic past. Official Pakistani historiography traces its origins to Muhammad bin Qasim’s invasion of Sindh in 712 CE. Islamic invaders who destroyed temples and erased indigenous traditions are glorified as ideological ancestors.
This civilisational rupture was not accidental. As documented by former Indian diplomat Narendra Singh Sarila in ‘The Shadow of the Great Game’ and economist Prasenjit K Basu in ‘Asia Reborn’, the Partition of India was deeply embedded in Britain’s imperial strategy.
Classified British correspondence reveals that on May 5, 1945, prime minister Winston Churchill commissioned a secret report recommending that Britain retain a military presence in India’s north-west—present-day Pakistan—to counter the Soviet Union. The report advocated detaching Baluchistan to safeguard British interests in the Gulf and the Middle East, highlighting its value as a military base, transit hub, and reservoir of “manpower of good fighting quality”.
On June 3, 1947, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin candidly admitted that the division of India would help Britain consolidate its position in the Middle East. A 1947 British military report went further, stating that Britain’s strategic requirements in the subcontinent could be met through an agreement with Pakistan alone, even if India refused cooperation.
Post-9/11, Pakistan became indispensable once again, even as it played a double game. Islam was never the objective; it was the instrument.
If Pakistan genuinely loved Islam, it would stand unequivocally with Muslim causes worldwide. Pakistan does not.
While Gaza burns and Iran faces sustained Israeli-American hostility, Pakistan’s establishment maintains strategic silence—or worse, strategic collaboration. Reports of Pakistani facilities being used indirectly by US forces against Iran, and the Pakistani Army chief’s simultaneous engagements in Washington, expose the hollowness of Ummah rhetoric.
Nowhere is Pakistan’s moral bankruptcy clearer than in its embrace of China. While Beijing systematically erases Uyghur Islamic identity—demolishing mosques, banning Quranic practices, incarcerating over a million Muslims in ‘re-education camps’—Pakistan remains conspicuously mute.
A self-proclaimed Islamic state reduced to a surrogate of an empire committing cultural genocide against Muslims is a contradiction too grotesque to ignore: loans, corridors, and strategic relevance purchase Pakistan’s silence.
Pakistan is not an Islamic state. It is an ideological construct consumed by hatred of its own pre-Islamic heritage, history, and civilisational traits, such as plurality. Islam has been reduced to an alibi: invoked to mobilise mobs, silence dissent, and deflect blame.
A state that cannot protect its own Muslims, persecutes minorities, allies with powers that bomb or erase Muslims elsewhere, and survives by playing the sidekick to global powers has hardly any right to speak in Islam’s name.
(Balbir Punj is a columnist,
author and former chairman of the Indian Institute of
Mass Communication.)
