Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Things look blacker than ever for Pakistan. While attention has been focussed on Libya and the revolts in other Arab nations, inhabitants of the world’s second-largest Muslim country are increasingly living in fear.

It’s open season on Christians there. Two politicians who dared support changing the country’s draconian blasphemy law have been gunned down. Both killings happened in Islamabad, the capital, a place supposedly chockablock with security, not the lawless frontier provinces.

The Taliban have claimed responsibility and warned the same fate awaits other dissenters. The government of Asif Ali Zardari — whose wife Benazir Bhutto also fell victim to the assassin’s bullet — is too weak to offer any credible resistance. Sectarian (Sunni/Shiite) shootings continue in the country’s largest cities.

Millions remain homeless after last summer’s devastating floods. There are problems with the economy, and unemployment is rising in tandem with the cost of food. Against this backdrop it’s hard not to conclude Pakistan is a lost cause. An editorial in the British newspaper The Guardian sees little reason for hope.

“One by one, those who stick their head above the parapet to demand changes in Pakistan’s infamous blasphemy law are being gunned down. First Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, and now Shahbaz Bhatti, Islamabad’s minister for minorities, himself a Christian. To say these men were liberals is to posit a false dichotomy. The people gunning them down are not conservatives. They are people who impose their authority by suicide bombings and murder. Their form of argument is terror, and the battle which should be fought against them by anyone who upholds freedom of belief should be as clear on the streets of Islamabad as it is in the foothills of Waziristan.”

Dean Nelson, The Daily Telegraph’s South Asian editor, is similarly despondent.

“The questions now are how many more will stand as defiantly as he and Salman Taseer did, and what hope remains in Pakistan for religious minorities to live without fear? The answers are very few and very little. Since Pakistan’s prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani ruled out government support for reforming the blasphemy law shortly after Salman Taseer’s murder, victory has been handed to the militants. Those brave souls, like Shahbaz Bhatti, who remained supporters of reform regardless, were thrown to the dogs. More importantly, the tiny Christian, Parsis, Sikh, Hindu and Ahmadi minorities will have seen that if even some of the most powerful people in the country – those with highly armed protection details like Bhatti and Taseer – can be killed so easily, what hope can they ever have of a fair hearing in any future dispute with a Muslim?”

Writing in the Daily Times, the newspaper founded by Taseer, Shahid Saeed dismantles some of the cherished myths of Pakistani society.

“Pakistanis, often drowning in delusion and grandeur, boast our modernist and progressive credentials by claiming that unlike India we do not have a caste system. Sadly, that is a myth and utterly fallacious. Besides social inequality that drives wedges in our society, a form of apartheid exists on the basis of religion. Hindus in Pakistan are discriminated against and remain stuck in the worst of economic conditions, besides being forced into conversions. Ahmadis cannot even proclaim their religion openly and are murdered in broad daylight round the year. Jews just ran away from this country knowing what was in store for them. Christians, Pakistan’s second largest minority, are discriminated against and killed in the name of blasphemy laws.”

More chillingly, an editorial in the country’s oldest English language newspaper Dawnsees the blasphemy law as the thin end of the wedge.

“Have the extremists won? They certainly have won the battle, such as it was, over the blasphemy laws. Man-made laws which no religious scholar with an iota of credibility can support in totality have now seemingly become sacrosanct, at one with sacred texts. But there is a larger battle, too, one for defining what Pakistan stands for and who has the right to live in peace here. And that battle is being won by the right wing. One by one, topics are being removed from the national discourse. There is no need for a concerted plan. Fearing for one`s life can have a dramatic chilling effect on what citizens and their leaders think is appropriate to say in public. Today, blasphemy laws can`t even be discussed. Tomorrow, what is permissible on television or radio may be challenged anew. The day after, what women are allowed to wear and do with their lives will be questioned further. Meanwhile, the politics of blaming others will spread.”

compiled by Araminta Wordsworth awordsworth@nationalpost.com