You can't understand the modern friction in Gilgit Baltistan by looking at theology. If you think the blood spilt along the Karakoram Highway is just the result of age-old religious hatred, you're buying into a carefully constructed myth. The reality is much more clinical, and much more tragic. This wasn't an organic explosion of tribal anger. It was engineered.
For centuries, this mountain region was a masterclass in pluralism. Shias, Sunnis, Ismailis, and Noorbakhshis lived in the same villages, intermarried, and managed local disputes through customary jirgas (tribal councils). Then, the state stepped in. Through a toxic combination of strategic infrastructure, forced demographic changes, and state-sponsored militancy in the 1970s and 1980s, the Pakistani establishment broke the region's social fabric. They didn't inherit a sectarian crisis; they built one.
The Highway That Weaponized Geography
Before the late 1970s, Gilgit Baltistan was geographically isolated. Guarded by the peaks of the Karakoram range, local communities relied on each other to survive the harsh winters. This isolation kept the region insulated from the broader, more aggressive sectarian currents of South Asia.
That changed with the completion of the Karakoram Highway in 1978.
On paper, the highway was an engineering marvel meant to boost trade and connect Pakistan with China. In practice, it served as a pipeline for demographic engineering. The state used the new road to alter the local demographic balance. Gilgit Baltistan was historically a Shia-majority pocket inside a heavily Sunni-majority Pakistan. By easing access for traders, preachers, and bureaucratic settlers from Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), the state eroded that majority.
Local administrative jobs, once held by locals, were increasingly given to non-local Sunnis. This wasn't accidental. The bureaucratic influx created an immediate sense of economic and political marginalization among the native Shia population.
Zia ul Haq and the Systematic Influx of Militancy
If the highway provided the infrastructure, General Zia-ul-Haq's regime provided the ideological gunpowder. Following his military coup in 1977, Zia launched an aggressive Islamization policy aimed at reshaping Pakistan according to strict Sunni Deobandi orthodoxy.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution panicked Zia's regime. Terrified that a politically active Shia majority in Gilgit Baltistan might mirror Iran's revolution, the state began weaponizing religious identity. The government funded a network of sectarian madrassas along the Karakoram Highway, explicitly bringing in radical Deobandi clerics from the south to preach virulent anti-Shia rhetoric.
Local students, lacking options due to a neglected state education system, entered these institutions. They didn't just learn theology; they were trained to view their neighbors as heretics.
The 1988 Massacre and the Broken Brotherhood
The simmering tensions boiled over in May 1988, marking the point of no return for the region. What started as a localized dispute in Gilgit town over the sighting of the Ramadan moon was used by the state to unleash a horrific wave of violence.
A rumor was deliberately circulated claiming that Shias had massacred Sunnis. In response, an organized lashkar (militant army) of over 80,000 Sunni tribesmen from Chilas and the southern districts marched onto Gilgit. These weren't just angry locals with sticks. They were heavily armed fighters, many of whom were veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war, mobilized with clear state complicity.
The state apparatus stood by and watched. For days, the lashkar razed Shia villages including Jalalabad, Bonji, and Pari. They slaughtered livestock, burned orchards, and murdered nearly 400 civilians. It wasn't a riot. It was a targeted campaign of ethnic cleansing designed to permanently shatter communal trust.
The strategy worked. The institutional memory of 1988 completely altered how the communities interacted. Intermarriages plummeted. Shared marketplaces divided into segregated zones. The regional peace was replaced by a fragile, heavily militarized truce.
The Cost of Continued Marginalization
Since 1988, the sectarian card has been pulled whenever locals demand their constitutional rights. Gilgit Baltistan exists in a constitutional limbo; its people lack full representation in Pakistan’s parliament because of the region's historical ties to the broader Kashmir dispute.
When locals unite across sectarian lines to demand land rights, political representation, or a fair share of economic benefits from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), sectarian incidents mysteriously spike. The 2005 assassination of Shia leader Agha Ziauddin, the 2012 Kohistan bus massacre where Shia passengers were pulled out and executed, and the coordinated blasphemy cases of 2023 all follow this pattern. Divide and rule remains the easiest way to govern without giving up real power.
To fix the divide, you have to acknowledge how it was made. It requires prosecuting the instigators of past violence, reforming the biased curricula taught in local madrassas, and granting the region its long-overdue constitutional status. Until the state stops treating Gilgit Baltistan as a strategic buffer zone and starts treating its people as citizens, the ghosts of 1988 will continue to haunt the mountains.
