The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
IF bodies of slain loved ones can indeed be weaponised by mourning families to blackmail a prime minister, the Hazara Shias of Balochistan must be the most well-armed and lethal community in the country. But is that really the case?
To understand this point, let’s take a cursory look at what the Hazara community has gone through over the past two decades. The community is, or was, approximately 0.7 million strong. Over the past 21 years an estimated 1,500 of its members have been murdered.
The rage and the bloodlust of the murderers has not even spared unarmed women and children, including infants, what to talk of men. If the same proportion of about 220m Pakistanis had been killed as the Hazaras have lost of their own, the toll would be close to half a million.