Pakistan’s Shias were the largest minority in the country, the second-largest Shia population outside Iran, but unlike Shias in the Arab world they had never felt downtrodden. Anti-Shia sentiment existed on the subcontinent, even in pre-partition India, but just as in the rest of the Muslim world until then, its expression was limited to a minority of clerics and their followers, a strand of thought that did not pervade the general population or undermine a country’s stability.
