Pakistan: A hell for religious minorities

BY ANTO AKKARA

“Pakistan is fast becoming a state that will be habitable only for extremists,” according to the Justice and Peace commission of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Pakistan.

In its latest annual report, the National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP)  pointed out that “religious bigots hold the view that only Muslims (as defined by them) have the right to live in this country – and that all non-Muslims are infidels who deserve to be killed”.

“The [religious] intolerance is certainly worsening and that is what we are worried about,” Fr Emmanuel Yousaf Mani, director of the NCJP, told The Southern Cross. Fr Mani pointed out that the commission had been bringing out the documentation since 1997.

To indicate the depth of the religious intolerance, the dossier cited the treatment meted out to the dead body of a Hindu victim when all 152 passengers on a flight died in a crash near Islamabad on July 28, 2010. While the names of the Muslim victims were inscribed on the coffins, the coffin of Prem Chand, a Hindu social activist, only bore the derogatory inscription “kafir” (non-believer). Shockingly, this took place at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in Islamabad, the premier medical centre run by the government.

The 146-page report documents incidents of persecution committed against Christians and other minorities under separate themes: blasphemy cases, grabbing of minority properties, bias in educational texts, discrimination and harassment at employment, abduction, and forced conversion and marriage of young Christian and Hindu women to Muslims. The study lists in detail major incidents of atrocities and harassment during 2010 against religious minorities, which comprise mostly Christians, Hindus and Ahmadis (the four million-strong Islamic sect not recognised as Muslim only in Pakistan), in a nation where nearly 95% are Muslims.

The draconian blasphemy law that continues to be misused to settle personal and property disputes against religious minorities merits an elaborate chapter. It lists 1081 cases of people being charged under the blasphemy law since 1986. Of these, 138 cases were against Christians, who number only 2% of a population of 180 million people. Similarly, 454 cases were filed against Ahmadis, who number only 4 million. Of the 40 blasphemy cases registered in 2010, 15 were against Christians. And 18 of the 37 people killed extra-judicially after being charged with blasphemy since 1986 were Christians.

Even the educational curriculum, the NCJP report noted, is “biased towards religious minorities…students were publicly ridiculed or even beaten by teachers because of their faith”. The study cited an incident in which 11-year old Nadia Iftikhar was severely beaten by her teacher when the girl said that she was both a Pakistani and a Christian. The teacher shouted at Nadia that according to the school textbook, all Pakistanis were Muslims, before thrashing her.

The dossier also documented in detail half a dozen cases of young women, including teenagers, who had been kidnapped, raped, forced to convert to Islam and marry their abductors. Those who resisted were killed and their parents harassed for reporting the cases to the police, who turn a blind eye to the perpetrators of such crimes.

In the deteriorating atmosphere of religious intolerance, the Catholic commission has urged the government to introduce major constitutional changes by implementing a “human rights framework and standards”.