Internet ‘vigilantes’ behind the rise of online blasphemy cases in Pakistan

Blasphemy is an incendiary charge in Muslim-majority Pakistan, where even unsubstantiated accusations can incite public outrage and lead to lynchings.

Aroosa Khan’s son was chatting on WhatsApp but suddenly found himself the target of “vigilante” investigators who accused him of having committed blasphemy online, a crime that carries the death penalty in Pakistan.

The 27-year-old is one in hundreds of young men standing trial in Pakistan courts accused of making blasphemous statements online or in WhatsApp groups, an offence for which arrests have exploded in recent years.

Many of the cases are being brought to trial by private “vigilante groups” led by lawyers and supported by volunteers who scour the Internet for offenders, rights groups and police say.

The families of young Pakistanis, including doctors, engineers, lawyers, and accountants, say that their relatives were duped into sharing blasphemous content by strangers online before being arrested.

“Our lives have been turned upside down,” Ms. Khan said, saying that her son, who has not been named for security reasons, had been tricked into sharing blasphemous content in the messaging app.

He had joined a WhatsApp group for job-seekers and was contacted by a woman.

She sent him an image of women with Quranic verses printed on their bodies, his mother said, adding that the contact then “denied having sent it and asked Ahmed to send it back to her to understand what he was talking about”.

He was later arrested and prosecuted by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA).

One local police report suggests that the vigilantes may be motivated by financial gains.

One such group was responsible for the conviction of 27 people who have been sentenced to life imprisonment or the death penalty over the past three years.

Blasphemy is an incendiary charge in Muslim-majority Pakistan, where even unsubstantiated accusations can incite public outrage and lead to lynchings.

While they date back to colonial times, Pakistan’s blasphemy laws were ramped up in the 1980s when dictator Zia ul-Haq campaigned to “Islamicise” society.

The most active private investigation group is the Legal Commission on Blasphemy Pakistan (LCBP), which said they are prosecuting more than 300 cases. Sheraz Ahmad Farooqi, one of the private investigation group’s leaders, said that more than a dozen volunteers track online blasphemy, believing that “God has chosen them for this noble cause”.

‘Legal course’

“We are not beheading anyone; we are following a legal course,” Mr. Farooqi said outside a courtroom that heard 15 blasphemy cases, all filed by his group.

He said that most of the accused were addicted to pornography and were disrespecting revered Islamic figures by using their names and dubbing voices attributed to them over pornographic content.

He acknowledged that women were involved in tracking and arresting the men, but they were not members of his group.

Cases can drag through the courts for years, though death penalties are often commuted to life in prison on appeal at the Supreme Court and Pakistan has never executed anyone for blasphemy.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) reported that multiple vigilante groups were working in a “dedicated manner” to “witch-hunt” people for online expression or to fabricate blasphemy evidence using social media with “vested agendas”.

“All such groups are formalised by self-declared defenders of majoritarian Islam,” the group said in a report published in 2023.

Published - October 15, 2024 10:00 am IST