On October 13, police opened fire on TLP protesters in Muridke. The official police count says three TLP workers died, plus one police officer and one passerby. The party claims its chief Saad Rizvi was shot. Some outlets reported 250 dead and 48 police officers killed, though Punjab Inspector General Usman Anwar dismissed these as baseless rumours. The hospital administrator in Muridke told journalists that 150 people came through with gunshot wounds in a single day, all suffering from injuries to various parts of their bodies. Police confirmed 48 law enforcement personnel were injured, 17 by gunfire. Nobody will know the real number because truth dies first in every encounter between state and citizen. The operation started around 3:30 in the morning and lasted six hours. After, witnesses reported the area was washed and cleared by authorities, with bodies reportedly moved from the scene in containers. Three days later, the Punjab government moved to ban TLP, freeze its assets, place its leadership on terrorism watch lists, and try them in anti-terrorism courts. Violence first, then law. That’s the pattern.
That same week the UN released another report about religious minorities. Killings of Ahmadis, demolished mosques, 82 graves desecrated in Kotli. In February alone: ten atrocities against Hindus, three against Sikhs, two against Ahmadis, one mentally disabled Christian charged with blasphemy. The experts wrote that attacks occur with tacit official complicity while fear prevents people and institutions from upholding minority rights. At the border, 60,000 Afghans were loaded onto trucks and pushed back in April. Most had lived here thirty, forty years. Children born in Pakistan who spoke Urdu better than Pashto were told Afghanistan was home. Between September 2023 and February 2025, at least 844,000 Afghans expelled. The UN calls it forced deportation. Now the same Punjab government moving to ban TLP announced it will include undocumented Afghans in the tax net, introduce a whistleblower system for reporting illegal residents, and conduct targeted operations against unregistered foreigners. All in the same meeting where they decided to ban TLP. The enemy rotates but the machinery stays the same.
These things happened in the same country in the same week and everyone pretended they were separate stories. Police violence here, religious persecution there, refugee crackdown elsewhere. As if they weren’t the same machine grinding different people but always grinding. The machine works like this: the state picks a group and marks them dangerous. Religious minorities threaten the Islamic character of the nation by existing. Political opposition must be foreign agents because nobody could genuinely oppose such leadership. Refugees are terrorists hiding among the desperate. Religious extremists who’ve attacked minorities for years somehow also threaten the state when they grow too bold. Once marked you’re fair game. If you’re Ahmadi the constitution itself declares you non-Muslim. Mobs attack your mosques and police watch or join in. Over a thousand Christian and Hindu girls kidnapped annually, forced to convert, married to their captors. Forced conversion isn’t illegal. Police routinely refuse to file complaints from minority families. If you’re Afghan you get night raids, detention camps, expulsion, and now the state wants to tax you before deporting you, wants citizens to report you anonymously. If you’re PTI you face military courts, torture, assassination attempts. Minister of State for Interior Talal Chaudhry said action against TLP will mirror what they did to PTI after May 9. If you’re TLP you get bullets before dawn, streets washed clean, then a ban declared through emergency meetings, your mosques sealed and handed to the Auqaf department, your bank accounts frozen, 2,716 arrested in one operation, 72 cases registered. The violence comes first, the legal cover after.
The pattern holds because it serves a purpose. Pakistan’s elite understand that division is profitable. Keep Sunnis hating Ahmadis, the middle class fearing Afghan refugees, religious parties and secular parties at each other’s throats. Every group convinced some other group is the real problem. Nobody looks up to see who’s holding the knife. The elite don’t just benefit from chaos, they require it. Rule of law means accountability, trials, evidence, rights. Better to have law mean whatever serves power in that moment. Courts that bend, police who serve the highest bidder, mobs unleashed when convenient and suppressed when they threaten the wrong targets. Consider the TLP. They built their movement defending blasphemy laws and incited violence against minorities for years. Called for judges to be murdered. Paralyzed cities. Ransacked Christian and Ahmadiyya places of worship. The state knew all this. In the meetings where they decided to ban TLP, officials reviewed the party’s timeline of violent protests, attacks on police, assaults on minority communities. They knew TLP had 72 registered criminal cases across Punjab. They knew about the attacks on places of worship. They knew for years. But they moved to ban them not for attacking minorities, not for the years of documented extremism, but for marching toward Islamabad. The problem was never TLP’s violence against others. The problem was when that challenge turned toward state authority.
Now watch what happens. TLP declared an extremist organization. Leaders placed on the Fourth Schedule. Assets seized, accounts frozen, social media blocked. Special prosecutors appointed for anti-terrorism courts. The state presents this as establishing law and order. But the law being enforced isn’t the law that protects minorities from forced conversions or Afghans from arbitrary detention or PTI workers from torture. It’s the law that protects the state from political challenge. The violence TLP inflicted on minorities for years never triggered this response. What triggered it was 7,000 people marching toward the capital. The state didn’t crush TLP for being extremists. It crushed them for being inconvenient. And it did so with a pre-dawn raid and bullets and then, only after witnesses said the blood was washed away, through legal procedures. Violence first, law after. The operation that killed anywhere from five to dozens to potentially hundreds happened before any ban was declared, before cases were filed in anti-terrorism courts, before special prosecutors were appointed. The state shot first and legislated later.
You can draw a straight line from the constitutional amendment declaring Ahmadis non-Muslim to police shooting protesters in Muridke to Afghan families being taxed before deportation to PTI workers facing the same treatment now promised TLP. The line runs through every institution meant to protect citizens that preys on them instead. Police participating in mob violence against minorities. Courts letting blasphemy accusers walk while the accused rot. Laws making forced conversion legal, giving officials immunity when they ignore kidnappings. A security apparatus that tortures political opponents and calls it counterterrorism. And now, a government that shoots protesters before dawn and calls a meeting three days later to recommend banning them, as if the legal process mattered, as if they hadn’t already decided with bullets. Pakistan didn’t stumble into this. Its elite chose it. The TLP ban isn’t a departure from this system. It’s the system working exactly as designed. Pick an enemy, unleash violence, apply legal cover, repeat.
The results are everywhere. Over 400 cases of religious persecution in the first quarter of 2025. Forced conversions running at over a thousand annually. Nearly a million Afghans expelled since 2023, with more targeted now through tax collection and whistleblower systems. Political opponents disappeared, tortured, tried in military courts. TLP getting the same treatment, 2,716 arrested in one sweep. In Muridke, bodies moved in containers according to witnesses, numbers nobody counts anymore because the truth stopped mattering years ago, numbers the state disputes and minimizes, numbers that hospitals record but dare not publicize, numbers that families carry without ever knowing what happened. Every few months someone calls for reform. The calls go nowhere because reform would require the elite to surrender the tools keeping them in power. The TLP ban won’t change this. They’ll be banned like PTI faces being banned, like PTM was banned, like every challenge to state authority gets neutralized not through political process but through declarations and operations and retroactive legal justification. And the violence against minorities will continue because that violence serves the system.
So it continues. TLP might regroup under a new name or disappear. More minorities will be attacked because the laws enabling those attacks remain unchanged, the mobs still operate with impunity, the police still refuse to file complaints. More Afghans deported, now with the added surveillance and taxation and neighbor reporting them before expulsion. More PTI workers facing military trials. The elite rotating between positions, making speeches about national security and law and order, never facing consequences. Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz chairs an extraordinary meeting and announces historic decisions and none of it is historic because it’s the same pattern with a different target. And ordinary Pakistanis keep dying in the streets, in their homes, in police custody, in mob attacks, in night raids, in deportations, in all the ways a state can kill its people without admitting it. They’re told someone else is the real enemy. They’re told Ahmadis are the problem or PTI or TLP or Afghans. Never that the problem is a system designed to keep them fighting each other while the elite extract what’s left.
The TLP leadership called for negotiations. The government said there would be talks. Around 3:30 in the morning police opened fire. Later officials claimed the protesters fired first. The state would have done it anyway. That’s what it’s for now. Not protection, not justice, not law. Just violence administered selectively, erased efficiently, denied completely. Three days later they held meetings and recommended a ban and appointed special prosecutors and talked about establishing the writ of the state as if that writ hadn’t already been established with bullets. As if the law being enforced was anything other than the law of power protecting itself. In Muridke witnesses say they washed the streets. In the hospitals 150 gunshot wounds treated and transferred. On the official record five dead including one officer and one passerby. In people’s memory the number keeps changing, keeps growing, keeps haunting. And now in government meetings they talk about banning the party and seizing assets and trying people in anti-terrorism courts, all the legal mechanisms applied after the violence, dressing up state killing in the language of law and order. This is how you rule a nation you’ve given up trying to govern. You make everyone equally vulnerable except yourself. You make security a privilege of power not a right of citizenship. You make law a weapon instead of a shield. You shoot first and ban later and call it justice. And when people ask questions about the death toll or why minorities remained unprotected while TLP got banned for marching not for attacking, you announce crackdowns on undocumented Afghans in the same breath. You link PTI to May 9 and TLP to Muridke and never mention that both received state violence first and legal proceedings after. The machinery keeps grinding. The bodies pile up. The official numbers stay low. The hospital records tell a different story. The families bury their dead and learn not to speak. And Pakistan continues its slow-motion collapse, powered by division, greased with blood, governed by violence disguised as law, overseen by an elite who’ll ride the wreckage down because they know they’ll land on someone else.