Sacred Games – A Brief History of Violence and Assassination of Pakistan’s Politicians

Do you know that Pakistan is the second most dangerous country in the world to be a politician or to run the elections? Thirty politicians have been killed in fifty-one attacks in last 70 years, and the trend does not seem to change its trajectory. Out of those participating in these political rallies, 734 got killed and 1,752 were injured. The complete dataset of assassinated politicians and the number of people killed and wounded is available at Kaggle through this link.  

It all started with the assassination of the first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan on October 16, 1951. Hayat Sherpao, General Zia-ul-Haq, Siddiq Khan Kanju, Hakim Muhammad Saeed, Azam Tariq, Imran Farooq, Iqbal Masih, Shahzad Bhatti, Salman Taseer, Bashir Bilour, Abdul Raziq Bugti, Bungal Bugti, Benazir Bhutto and most recently Haroon Bilour and Siraj Raisani were added to the list of assassinated Pakistani politicians. There were a few failed attempts too, for example, Pervez Musharraf survived four while MQM’s Izhar-ul-hassan and Rashid Godil escaped one assassination attempts each. Moreover, I am not counting assassinations carried out by state-actors like for Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Akbar Bugti, Murtaza Bhutto and Shahnawaz Bhutto.

Mexico comes at first place with 133 politicians killed, Russia comes third with 33 and India comes at fourth place with 23 – Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Partab Singh, Phoolan Devi and Pramod Mahajan are few notable ones. The list includes 1 prime minister, 2 opposition leaders, 3 home ministers and 2 chief ministers.

There is also an old recipe of using violence and killings as an apparatus for election delays, maneuvers and control.  The history of elections and the violence go hand in hand – 92 people getting killed in Kenya’s election or 31 in Honduras, 80 candidates in Mexico or 11 in Assam, India, or even 74 in Pakistan’s last elections.

The deadly cycle of violence has already started for this election. Haroon Bilour of Awami National Party (ANP) got killed with 20 others and 65 wounded in a suicide bombing attack in Peshawar. 149 got killed, and 186 left injured in a deadly suicide bombing attack on BAP’s leader Siraj Raisani. Four people died, and 10 got injured after an explosion near JUI-F’s Akram Durrani rally in Bannu. And former senator and ANP leader Daud Achakzai got injured in a firing incident at Qilla Abdullah, Baluchistan. Total tally comes to 174 dead, and 262 injured so far, making it one of the deadliest elections in Pakistan.  Mastung blast is the second most lethal terrorist attack in the history of Pakistan with 149 dead, 139 people died in 2007 attack on Benazir Bhutto in Karachi, and 150 killed in the APS attack in Peshawar in 2014.

The dataset contains the following fields:

Serial No, Politicians Name, Day, Date, Day Type, Time, City, Province, Location, Location Type, Latitude, Longitude, Party Name, Number of people killed and Injured and Target Status (Survived or Dead).

Here is the list of ideas we are working on and like you to help. Please post your kernels and analysis

1. Help us improve the dataset and list the missing incidents with details (if any). You can do so by uploading a new version of the dataset or contacting us
2. See how these incidents have influence voter’s turn out in respective and adjacent constituencies. You can link our Pakistan Elections Dataset for analysis.
3. Find out if killing the politician would help opponents win the election?
4. Plot if visually on Pakistan’s map as we have provided long-lat information
5. Compare the numbers with other countries
6. Historically, find out which constituencies are dangerous with a heat map and see if we can predict the location of next violence
7. Rank the parties based on the number of attacks and killings
8. What day or time is the deadliest
9. Any other pattern you can see or visualize
10. Any other dataset suggestion we should combine with this dataset