On the morning of 3 December, Priyantha Kumara, the 49-year-old export manager of Rajco Industries, asked his workers to remove a sticker from a machine in their factory in Sialkot. Kumara, a Sri Lankan, had lived in the industrial town in Punjab since 2010, when he and his two brothers had come to Pakistan in search of better economic opportunities. The Kumaras worked hard, kept their heads down, and like migrants the world over had managed to build honest lives out of their lonely labour. The sticker in question had been put up by supporters of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a hardline Islamist party that in April 2021 was declared a militant organisation by prime minister Imran Khan’s government. Khan has been nicknamed Captain U-Turn by his opponents, and proceeded to remove the ban on the TLP a mere six months later, bending to the fundamentalist outfit when they took to the streets in a dharna or protest. Khan himself had popularised the dharna as a form of political strategy during his opposition days, and though the TLP’s agitation was violent, killing as many as six policemen as they rampaged through the streets of Lahore, Khan responded by taking them off the terror list. Kumara had lived in Pakistan long enough to know to stay away from our serpentine politics. He wanted the sticker removed because he was a diligent and professional manager, and the factory was to undergo a whitewash ahead of a delegation of visitors arriving. When the workers refused, he removed the sticker himself, at which point some of his young employees erupted in a fury, accusing Kumara of blasphemy – religious verses had been printed on the sticker – and exhorting their co-workers to kill him. In Pakistan, to accuse someone of blasphemy is a death sentence. You can denounce someone without even clarifying how exactly they blasphemed – lest you commit blasphemy yourself – so the charge is often used to settle enmities, land disputes or petty vendettas. Hundreds of factory workers chased Kumara, tearing his clothes and beating him. A co-worker tried to shield Kumara, protecting him with his own body, but he could not hold back the angry young men for long. After they broke Kumara’s bones, they dragged him out to the road and set him alight. The killers, all young men and boys, shouted TLP slogans and took selfies for their social media feeds, standing next to the black smoke of what the Pakistani journalist Zarrar Khuhro called their “human bonfire”. For timid men to erupt in sudden violence in south Asia is not new, we are a riotous subcontinent – but the selfies, those are new. One of the men who posed in front of Kumara’s burning body was captured by another lens. Holding his camera up above his face as he glared into the screen, one could read the writing on this back of his smartphone: “Apna time ayega,” it said, citing the lyrics of a popular Bollywood rap song. My time will come. Though Khan himself condemned the blasphemy killing and the military declared “zero tolerance” for extremists, not everyone was in full accord. Pervez Khattak, Pakistan’s doddering defence minister, told the press that there was no link between the murderous lynching and the government’s flip-flopping and unbanning of the TLP. “Murders take place,” he opined, when young men are emotional. “When you were in college, were you also not emotional?” he asked a journalist. There has been no recognition that enraged men like this tend also to be victims of a poorly imagined globalisation. Men who left rural communities for cities in search of wealth and opportunity, only to find that nothing awaited them except the “glittering misery” of urban life. Unheard and unseen, these angry men toil with no future and few prospects ahead of them. They are the casualty of so many colliding forces, both social and political, that exploit their dreams of liberty and economic security, using them for cheap labour – Rajco Industries makes sportswear for export, shiny workout gear sold for hundreds of dollars – in return for a suffocating and crushing invisibility. This invisibility is the source of a chilling rage, a murderous undercurrent travelling beneath us at all times. It spares no one, not the young, not the old, infecting everyone equally. A viral video of a stray dog in Islamabad was recently uploaded to social media. Though the shivering, frightened dog averts its eyes from the humans that surround it, the squeaky, babyish voice of a young girl, a child, can be heard off-camera: “I want to rip it to pieces,” she says, in a tinny, cartoon-like voice. Across the border in India, where Narendra Modi’s rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has held power for the last seven years, the cases of lynchings are too many and too grotesque to count. The Indian right has all but made living as a Muslim a crime, and routinely paints Muslims as jihad-hungry fifth columnists: Muslim men who marry Hindu women are accused of committing “love jihad”. Recently, saffron-clad mobs assembled in Gurgaon, a Delhi satellite, with the sole purpose of stopping Muslims from performing their daily prayers. “There will be no namaz here,” screamed angry Hindu fundamentalists. When Muslims, with fewer and fewer mosques to pray in, began to offer their prayers outside on the dirt of Gurgaon’s open roadsides, the furious men howled that they would not tolerate Muslim “land jihad”. “What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon,” wrote the political philosopher Frantz Fanon, “is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question or be shaken to pieces by it.” The collective rage shimmering in the subcontinent is set against a paper-thin political fragility: the fragility of our leaders, small men who cannot stomach criticism or make the effort to care for a wounded and terrified citizenry; the fragility of majorities who refuse to cede any ground to minorities; the fragility of damaged men whose hearts are broken and cannot express themselves except through unhinged acts of cruelty; and the fragility of the rich who are blind to the anxieties of the dispossessed all around them. Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani author of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Runaways was published last year by Verso Books