Pakistan: All Saints Church in Peshawar : The Dark Side

When 78 Christians lost their lives in a twin suicide attack on the All Saints Church in Peshawar in September last year, an urgent call to end the persecution of minorities in Pakistan was raised. The Christians along with other minorities groups took their grievances to the Supreme Court (SC) to get their plight redressed. The court in its detailed judgment in June this year gave instructions to the government to take a number of steps to improve the precarious condition of the minorities. The steps recommended by the SC included the creation of a national minorities council, the formation of a special police unit and a task force, and revising the curricula.

The national minorities council, according to the SC order, should give advice and recommendations to parliament on the issues affecting the minorities. The specially trained police and a task force would monitor the general conditions and the places of worship of the minorities, while the reformed curricula should highlight the dignity and respect the minorities deserve and expect. It is now five months and the government in its usual mode of taking the judiciary and its orders lightly has done nothing to alleviate the poor conditions of the minorities in Pakistan. Had the government been responsible and taken its constitutional obligations seriously, we might not have witnessed yet another macabre incident. The lynching of the Christian couple in Kot Radha Kishan on November 4 has exposed the dark side of our society that has fallen apart morally. The government has been swift, as it has been on several such occasions earlier, to pick up a few suspects. The question is will it be able to identify, try and punish the culprits according to the law? Will the government muster the strength to face up to the mullahs and make necessary amendments in and/or the repeal of the controversial blasphemy law? There are considerable doubts about the government’s intention to do any of these considering its style of doing business, where the constitution, judicial orders and the democratic ethos are by large only given lip service.

The SC has sent a reminder to the government to wake up to its responsibilities and implement the court’s orders on protecting the rights of the minorities. It has now become almost a pattern for the government to evade court orders and circumvent the constitution unless shaken out of its slumber by some ultimatum. It goes to the credit of the former Chief Justice of Pakistan, Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani, to have taken up the minorities’ issue and attempted to educate the government in this regard. Pakistan is high on the global human rights violations list. The government should at the very least give the minorities their due rights as enshrined in the constitution.