Pakistan’s religious minorities continue to suffer

By SUNIL KUKREJA

The statesman, writer and second president of the United States John Adams is noted to have said, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Pakistan’s foreign minister would indeed be well served to come to terms with what John Adams said. Recent, albeit modest, international attention focused on the persecution of religious minorities in Pakistan was apparently noteworthy enough to compel the foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, to comment on the issue publicly during a recent visit to Brussels.

Quite predictably, the foreign minister summarily dismissed claims that the persecution of Christians was in any way systematic or reflective of a wider trend. Indeed, according to him, at best any such reports of persecution were nothing more than “individual incidents.”

The persecution of religious minorities in Pakistan was brought to the fore due to the international profile given to the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who was convicted of blasphemy in 2010 and who languished on death row for eight years before her conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court.Blasphemy laws in Pakistan have been the source of unwelcome attention for the government, as these laws have been seen as widely exploited and invoked against people of various religious minorities to settle scores in what almost invariably amounts to personal disputes. Asia Bibi’s saga was apparently one such example.Not long following her release from prison, Asia Bibi left Pakistan to resettle in Canada. As tragic and traumatic as her case was, she remains fortunate for having survived her ordeal. Many of those persecuted for religious reasons have not been so fortunate.Qureshi is either curiously ill-informed or he conveniently chooses to ignore the fact that over the last 30 years, some 1,500 individuals – Christians, Hindus and people from Muslim religious minorities – have been charged under blasphemy laws.

Yet it is not just blasphemy laws that are repressive for Pakistan’s religious minorities. As leading journalist and former member of the National Assembly Farahnaz Ispahani has noted, “cleansing Pakistan of minorities” has been evident – and ongoing – since the partition from India and the creation of Pakistan. This process of targeting especially the Hindus (who still make up the largest religious minority in Pakistan), Christians, and other minority Muslims such as the Ahmadis, has directly correlated with the increased influence of hard-line Islam and the “Talibanization” of the country; something if not fully abated, then tacitly tolerated by each successive government.

It is worth quoting Farahnaz Ispahani at length:

“At the time of partition in 1947, almost 23% of Pakistan’s population was [composed] of non-Muslim citizens. Today, the proportion of non-Muslims has declined to approximately 3%. The distinctions among Muslim denominations have also become far more accentuated over the years. Muslim groups such as the Shias who account for approximately 20-25% of Pakistan’s Muslim population, Ahmadis who have been declared non-Muslim by the writ of the state, and non-Muslim minorities such as Christians, Hindus and Sikhs have been the targets of suicide bomb attacks on their neighborhoods, had community members converted to Islam against their will, and had their houses of worship attacked and bombed even while they were inhabited by worshipers.”

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/07/opinion/pakistans-religious-minorities-continue-to-suffer/