CRSS Note: Since 2011, Pakistan celebrates national “Minorities Day” on August 11. The first “Minorities Day” was observed to the context of the cold-blooded assassination of former minister of minorities affairs Shehbaz Clement Bhatti on March 2, 2011. CRSS is releasing this article as its commitment to equal rights for religious minorities living in Pakistan.
Pakistani Constitution &Religious Minorities
“What the Muslim League has done is to set you free from the reactionary elements of Muslims and to create the opinion that those who play their selfish games are traitors. It has certainly freed you from that undesirable element of maulvis and maulanas (as well as (the clutches of the British government, the Congress, the reactionaries and so-called Muslims)”
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Founder of Pakistan, in a speech at the Strachey Hall of the Aligarh University on February 5, 1938.
And on August 10, Pakistan’s Minister In-charge for National Harmony Dr Paul Bhatti in a message on the Minorities’ Day also recalled what Jinnah had said decades ago.
“The day we celebrate every year on August 11, recalls the vision of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah with reference to his speech and the contribution of non-Muslim communities to Pakistan. The celebration of Minorities’ Day provides us with an opportunity to re-assure that despite belonging to different faiths we are one nation that continues to march for a united and prosperous Pakistan,” Dr.Bhatti said.
Several events, seminars and social gatherings were arranged across the country by members of various religious minorities as well as the Ministry of National Harmony to commemorate
But away from these ceremonial gestures, the situation of religious minorities is not comforting at all; Pakistan today finds itself in the clutches of exactly the same elements that Mohammad Ali Jinnah – also known as the QuaideAzam – spoke about three-quarters of a century ago. These elements bear down heavily on the religious minorities too, explained through theunusual surge in violence againstthem in recent months across Pakistan, underlining an atmosphere ofgrowingintolerance. Not only have Pakistani Christians,Ahmadis, Sikhs, and Hindus suffered at the hands of unknown extremist groups but the Shia Muslim community, too, has borne the brunt of religious extremism and social intolerance.
Recent cases include the killing of two Hindu Brothers in Umerkot, southern Sindh province,on August 6, 2014. Onthe same day ayoung Sikh trader, who had fled fighting in the tribal areas called FATA, was gunned downin Peshawar, the capital of the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Earlier on July 26, 2014, an Ahmadi man was poisoned and shot dead in Gojra in Toba Tek Singh near Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s most populous Punjab province,while a few days before that, another Ahmadi was murdered in Nawabshah, Sindh province. In yet another brazen attack on a minority community, two Ahmadi girls, one woman and an unborn baby were burned alive involving an issue over a picture on Facebook on July 27 in Gujranwala, Punjab and the list keeps getting longer.[1]
Strangely, the July 27 incident in Gujranwala targeting Ahmadis, drew no reaction from Shahbaz Sharif, the Punjab chief minister.
The exponential rise in the persecution of religious minorities calls into question Article 25 of Pakistan’s constitution which holds all citizens equal before the law and entitles them to equal protection by law (the right to Equal Citizenry). On the contrary,the constitution also includes laws against blasphemy and declares the Ahmadiyyacommunity as “non-Muslims.”. These are some of the most abused laws in Pakistan’s constitution and underline the loopholes in Pakistan’s implementationof minorities’ protection.
A report by the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan(HRCP) also underscores the abuse of the blasphemy law, revealing that during 2013 as many as 39 cases of blasphemy were registered against Pakistani citizens including Muslims, Christians and Hindus.[2]
Ironically, the current alarming incidence of violence against religious minorities also reminds one of the famous speech by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of the nation, in which he promised the freedom of worship and equality without discrimination to religious minorities residing in Pakistan. In his address to the 1st Constituent Assembly on 11th August, 1947, he said; “You are free; free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state.” [3]
Religious minorities – Christians, Sikhs, Hindus – make up roughly five percent of Pakistan’s at least 180 million Muslim population, according to the last census carried out in 1998. (The country has not held national headcount since).Shias constitute at least 15 percent of the population but minorities’ organizations believe their numbers in the total population may be far above the oft-quoted five percent.
All minorities in the country, including the Muslim Shias, feel that the state has not only failed to protect them but continues to tolerate and condone faith-based violence in the country – mostly ducking under political expedience. The reluctance of chief minister Sharif in condemning the killings of Ahmadis, or silence of most politicians over the broad-day murder of former governor of the Punjab province in January 2011, also testifies the usual mainstream political disinclination to condemn attacks on minorities.
The HRCPreported a rise in sectarian killings by more than a fifth in Pakistan in 2013, the year of general elections when the PML-N government came into power. The same reporttermed Pakistan as having become “a more and more dangerous country” for religious minoritiesand “increasingly intolerant of dissent”.[4]The year 2013 was perhaps “one of the darkest” years for Christians in Pakistan due to the deadliest ever suicide bombing attack on the All Saints Church in Peshawar soon after the Sunday service,which killed nearly 100 worshippers in September 2013.[5]
In March 2013, five Hindu temples were ransacked and set ablaze by a mob at midnight in the town of Larkana, an attack sparked only by an accusation of blasphemy. This has beenconsidered as the worst attack on the Hindus in Pakistan in over 20 years.[6]According to a report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent federal advisory body created by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) to monitor religious freedom abuses abroad, the Shia community alone has suffered over 77 attacks from militant and terrorist organizations in recent months, some of which have been the deadliest attacks on this marginalized community in their holy months and pilgrimages. The report tracked up to 203 publicly-reported incidents of sectarian violence which accounted for 1,800 casualties and the death of 700 persons.[7] Another report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan attributed the loss of 678 lives to sectarian violence in 2013 alone in Pakistan.[8] The European Organization of Pakistani Minorities, an independent Human Rights Organization,stated in a report published in 2014 that, alongside target killings and sectarian massacre, other incidents of violence against minorities in the past six months in Pakistanhave been in the form of rape, murder, forced conversions, abductions and torching of holy books and temples,. These have affected up to 150 Shias, 23 Hazaras, 45 Hindus, 21 Sikhs, 66 Christians, 22 Ahmadis and 13 others, where private citizens, besides banned militant organizations, are also to blame. Cases of desecration of temples and holy books of religious minorities have totaled up to 27 in the last half year.[9]
While the Shias have been at a higher risk of becoming victims of suicide bombings and targeted shootings by sectarian terrorist organizations like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Ashok Chand, Vice Chairman of the All Pakistan Hindu Rights Movement (APHRM), says that in addition to the above mentioned threats, religious minorities also continue to be restricted from performing their religious duties. According to USCIRF, between January 2012 and June 2013 alone, there were 16 attacks against Hindus and 3 attacks against the Sikh population which killed two Hindus and one Sikh while severely injuring four Hindus. Hindu minorities’ representatives claim that their women are easy targets for rape, conversions and forced marriages. Moreover, any accusation of blasphemy, which is punishable by death, is easy to drive a Hindu or any other religious minority from home.[10]
The alarming increase in the number of horrific attacks against minorities in Pakistan raises concerns abroad too; Pakistan being a party to various UN treaties including the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) it ratified in 2010, is obliged under the article 27 of ICCPR to ensure the freedom to ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities living in Pakistan to profess and practice their religion, use their language and enjoy their culture.[11]
More importantly, Articles 20, 21 and 22 also guarantee every citizen the freedom to profess, practice and propagate religion and to manage religious institutions.
Despite this, USCIRF noted a severe deterioration of the religious freedom environment for Christians, Shias, Sikhs, Ahmadis and Hindusin Pakistan in the last eighteen monthsin its 2014 Annual Report. The Minority Rights Group International, a watchdog organization, hasalso ranked Pakistan as the world’s top country in terms of religious persecution since 2007. As point out by PML-N lawmaker Ramesh Kumar Wankwani in the Pakistani National Assembly, every year, up to 5000 Hindus migrate from Pakistan to India and other countries due to threats while an estimated number of 1,000 Christian and Hindu women are forced to convert and marry Muslim men.[12]
It is not a coincidence that religious persecution in Pakistan has increasedwith the election of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who maintains close ties with Saudi Arabia, a country known for its conservative preaching of Wahhabism/Salafismwhich vehemently denounces minorities.[13]In fact, Ayesha Siddiqa, a Pakistani civilian military scientist, geo-strategist, author, former bureaucrat and political commentator, even alleges in a report titled, “The New Frontiers: Militancy & Radicalism in Punjab” thattheendless anti-minority carnages and acts of vandalismin Pakistan cannot take place without the collusion of the PML-N government with terrorist outfits like LashkareJhangvi.[14]The allegation that the current government may be encouraging faith-based violence has been voiced by many human right activists too. I. A. Rehman, Secretary General of HRCP is of the view that minorities have particularly begun feeling more insecure since the PML-N government came into power in June 2013.[15]The root of this fear is perhaps also due to the situation in Punjab.Once a refuge for Hindus compared with some of the other areas of Pakistan, Punjab, despite being a heartland for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, is now a power base for militant groups.[16]Despite the mounting incidents of violence against the Hindus in the area, the Punjab Chief Minister continues to restrain from any action to curb the situation. In fact, a Punjab government spokesperson even went so far to reject the suggestion that authorities were not doing their job properly to help the Hindu minorities.[17]However, ironically, when a kite-flying incident in Sheikhupura slit the throat of a young motorcyclist in May 2014, the Punjab Chief Minister MianShahbaz Sharif was quick to demand a report from the IG police of the incident and a case against was even registered to seek further investigation into the incident.[18]Such display of inaction on the part of the mainstream political for religious minorities raises suspicions if the government really indirectly encourages faith-based violence in the first place.
While banned militant groups and private citizens continue to be apparently considered responsible for the majority of the attacks, government actors should not be considered blameless for the growing threats to minorities. Not only do the police turn a blind eye to many mob attacks, they have refused to file police reports when victims have been found to be a religious minority.[19] Some Human Rights activists are even of the view that tolerance of militancy provides a cover for opportunist attacks by those who wish to actually grab land, homes or businesses of minority neighbors by giving it the guise of religion.[20]Sherry Rehman, former ambassador to the US and currently a government minister, believestwo chief reasons account for the failure of the government to protect minorities; the rising religious intolerance in the country and the space the government continues to yield to violent ideologies in Pakistan.[21]
The recent killing of two Hindu Brothers in Umerkot and a Sikh boy in Peshawar on August 6 finally triggered a discussion between the government and the opposition,resulting in the agreement to constitute a fact-finding committee which would investigate into all the incidents of violence against religious minorities across Pakistan. The issue was raised by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Following this, the Defence Minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, stated that both the federal and provincial governments should collaborate their efforts to provide security to religious minorities.[22]Increasing threats to the lives and basic civil rights of religious minorities is not only detrimental to Pakistan’s image abroad, but is also severely impacting the socio-political cohesion within the country, often pitching one community against the other – all in the name of religion.
The situation therefore demands that the conversation on minorities’ rights must go beyond a fact-finding mission relating to a particular incident. It is high time the parliamentarians adopt a harsher stance against the issuein the National Assembly, and hence the need to take the fact-finding to a logical conclusion i.e. strict punitive action against violators of fundamental rights of citizens – regardless of which faith they belong to. The government should not only take effective administrative action rooted in the existing laws, but also solicit support of mainstream political parties to minimize, if not entirely remove, the inherent contradictions inthe Federal Constitution as far as religious minorities are concerned. They need to join hands to preventing the abuse of existing laws, which often results in harm not only to non-Muslim citizens of Pakistan but also to the Shia Muslims of the country.
[1]NEWS EOPM . European Organization of Pakistani Minorities, 2014.
[2]Jamal Shahid. “Situation worsening for religious minorities: HRCP.” Dawn, April 25, 2014.
[3]National Assembly of Pakistan. Address of the Founder of Pakistan Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah on 11th August, 1947 to 1st Constituent Assembly. n.d. http://www.na.gov.pk/en/print.php?content.php&id=74 (accessed August 9, 2014.
[4]Jamal Shahid. “Situation worsening for religious minorities: HRCP.” Dawn, April 25, 2014.
[5]The Express Tribune. “Violence against minorities rose alarmingly in 2013: HRCP.” April 24, 2014.
[6]The Express Tribune. “Hindus, other minorities in Pakistan face surge of violence.” May 6, 2014.
[7]Hindus, Shias, other minorities worse off in Pakistan: US report. July 18, 2013. http://news.oneindia.in/2013/07/18/hindus-shias-other-minorities-worse-off-in-pakistan-us-1262235.html (accessed August 9, 2014).
[8]Jamal Shahid. “Situation worsening for religious minorities: HRCP.” Dawn, April 25, 2014.
[9]The Express Tribune. “Minority rights: Cultural diversity under threat in Pakistan.” July 1, 2014.
[10]The Express Tribune. “Hindus, other minorities in Pakistan face surge of violence.” May 6, 2014.
[11]Mariam Faruqi. A Question of Faith: A Report on the Satus of Religious Minorities in Pakistan.Islamabad: Jinnah Institute, 2011.
[12]The Express Tribune. “Violence against minorities rose alarmingly in 2013: HRCP.” April 24, 2014.
[13]The Express Tribune. “Hindus, other minorities in Pakistan face surge of violence.” May 6, 2014.
[14]LUBP. Editorial: Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif is the political face of Deobandi terrorists: New York Times vindicates LUBP’s claim. November 10, 2013. http://lubpak.com/archives/289769 (accessed August 9, 2014).
[15]The Express Tribune. “Violence against minorities rose alarmingly in 2013: HRCP.” April 24, 2014.
[16]The Express Tribune. “Hindus, other minorities in Pakistan face surge of violence.” May 6, 2014.
[17]Ibid.
[18]The Nation. “Youth succumbs to kite string.” May 19, 2014.
[19]Hindus, Shias, other minorities worse off in Pakistan: US report. July 18, 2013. http://news.oneindia.in/2013/07/18/hindus-shias-other-minorities-worse-off-in-pakistan-us-1262235.html (accessed August 9, 2014).
[20]The Express Tribune. “Hindus, other minorities in Pakistan face surge of violence.” May 6, 2014.
[21]Ibid.
[22]The Express Tribune. “Fact-finding panel: NA committee to probe attacks on minorities.” August 7, 2014.