The people who target religious minorities in Pakistain had been nurtured as the state's proxy warriors; the state then surrendered to them its monopoly of violence150-strong mob of pious Mohammedans in Islamabad committed vandalism, baying for the blood of a mentally challenged Christian child Ramsha because they thought she had burned the Koran. The police had her under arrest pretending it was for her own security. Earlier, a mad 'blaspheming' man in Bahawalpur was taken out of jail and burned to death. After the imposition of the Blasphemy Law the first major case was also against a 14 year old Christian boy in Gujranwala who had to be smuggled abroad to prevent him from being killed.
According to World Minority Rights Report 2011, Pakistain ranks as the 6th worst country after some African states in respect of safety and rights of minorities. This includes non-Mohammedans, those the state has dubbed non-Mohammedan, and women. Ironically, this behaviour also includes persecution of non-Mohammedans through forced conversion to Islam, through forcible marriages of non-Mohammedan girls to Mohammedans, and apparently willing conversion of non-Mohammedans to Islam to secure themselves against persecution.
Hindus of Sindh have tried to migrate to India. (Nearly 568 FIRs for forced marriages were lodged last year across 40 districts of Pakistain, with the majority of such cases having been filed in Sindh.) Instead of sympathising with such runaways, the liberal PPP government suspected them of being disloyal to Pakistain and stopped them - for some time - from visiting India. Hindus are the largest minority community in Sindh.
The minister who did that himself fears being killed by the elements who hunt Pakistain's Hindu community. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistain's Balochistan...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it...
chapter has identified an ongoing exodus of Hindu families from Quetta too due to fear of kidnappings for ransom, yet the Balochistan government does not seem to be doing much to address this problem.
Christians living in the Islamic world are marginalised and threatened with persecution. But Pakistain perhaps began the trend. InFebruary 1997, the twin villages of Shantinagar-Tibba Colony 12 kilometres East of Khanewal, Multan Division, were looted and burnt by 20,000 Mohammedan citizens and 500 coppers. The police first evacuated the Christian population of 15,000, then helped the raiders use battle-field explosives to blow up their houses and property.
In November 2005, the Christian community of Sangla Hill in Nankana District in Punjab experienced a most hair-raising day of violence and vandalism. Daily Dawn (13 November 2005) described it like this:
| Under the present PPP government, a Christian federal minister has been killed by Punjabi Taliban in broad daylight in Islamabad |
In May 2009, some 12 Christian families fled their homes in a village of Sahiwal because they feared that a dispute growing around an act of blasphemy in a school may result in their persecution. The village had at least 6,500 voters in it but the dispute - which may be political - was entwined with the other politics of blasphemy law.
The community cowered in the face of dire announcements being made from mosque loudspeakers. The 'blasphemy' incident took place in a classroom in a local school where a page of the Holy Koran was found with ink splattered on it when the school opened in the morning.
The same month, an incident put the world on notice about what Pakistain is moving towards. In Surjani Town in Bloody Karachi...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It may be the largest city in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
, some Pashtun neighbourhood myrmidons wrote graffiti on the church wall saying: 'Taliban zindabad', 'Islam zindabad', 'Christians Islam qabool karo ya jiziya dow', etc, after which an exchange of fire maimed some Christians in addition to killing one.
| When the state of Pakistain apostatised the Ahmadis through an Amendment in the Constitution in the 1970s, some observers opined that the Shia community would be next in line for exclusion and slaughter |
If the state in Pakistain survives, it must call to mind the following articles of the Constitution that give protection to the Christians who form the largest religious minority in Punjab estimated to be between 2 to 4 million:
Article 20: freedom to profess religion and to manage religious institutions; Article 22: safeguards around education with respect to religious freedom; Article 25: equality of citizenship; Article 36: protection of minorities. But these rights and values enshrined in the Constitution have been undermined by a series of legislations related to the affirmation of the state's ideological credentials.
The introduction in 1984 of the Qanoon-e-Shahadat or 'Law of Evidence' reduces the value of court testimony of a Mohammedan woman and a non-Mohammedan male citizen to that of half a Mohammedan and, by extension, that of a non-Mohammedan woman to one-quarter. Similarly the introduction of a series of amendments to the Blasphemy Laws in the PPC [section 295], adding in 1982 section 295-B which provides for mandatory life imprisonment for desecrating the Holy Koran, and in 1986 the even harsher section 295-C, which is mandatory death in respect of the insult of the Prophet (PTUI!), exposes the broadly poverty-stricken Christian community to abuses of the law.
Most Mohammedans hold that violation of some human rights
One man's rights are another man's existential threat.
takes place because of the tough living conditions and poverty in the country. The view displays all the collective blind spots about human rights. It presumes certain conditions to exist against objective evidence to the contrary. It talks about the minorities in Pakistain without being aware of their view of how they are being treated. Under the present PPP government a Christian federal minister has been killed by Punjabi Taliban in broad daylight in Islamabad.
Today in 2012, you have TV anchors saying more or less the same thing: Mohammedans themselves are being maltreated, so the persecution of non-Mohammedans cannot be blamed on them. Going on a tangent, they allude to the Rohingya Mohammedans of Burma about whom the rascally foreign-funded NGOs have done nothing. (In Burma, the NGOs protesting Rohingya rights are savagely suppressed by the Burmese ruling junta.) The ominous sign in Pakistain is that the majority Mohammedan community is completely inured against what the minorities are going through.
The blasphemy law victims bear the brunt of the rage of the Barelvis like late Maulana Sarfraz Naeemi, secretary general of Tanzimat Madaris Dinia, who actually led a Lashkar to Sangla Hill to punish the Christians already mauled by local Mohammedans. He was later killed by the Taliban who think Barelvis are not good Mohammedans. The Deobandi rage is directed at the Shia community too. When the state of Pakistain apostatised the Ahmadis through an Amendment in the Constitution in the 1970s some observers opined that the Shia community would be next in line for exclusion and slaughter.
The day has arrived. Like the Ahmadis, the Shia are being killed all over Pakistain like lambs at the slaughter house without much disturbance among the Sunni community which leans on anti-Americanism to favour the Taliban and their ancillary warriors originally prepared by the Army against India.
The Shia are not named as a minority in the national census but are informally considered to be nearly 30 percent of the total population. A storm is brewing against them in the Middle East, and Pakistain could be considered as a country where it all began with the help of the state of Pakistain which nurtured the Shia-hating Deobandis and allowed its personnel in the intelligence agencies handling the covert war to be reverse-indoctrinated.
The al Qaeda-linked Lashkar Jhangvi in August 2012 published a gruesome video on jihadist internet showing the beheading of two Shia. In a statement that accompanied the video on one of the forums, a jihadist said Lashkar Jhangvi is part of al Qaeda and the Taliban. Two of the Lashkar fighters then pulled out knives, and proceeded to behead the Shia men. The victims' heads were then placed on their laps. The warriors wiped their knives on the clothes of the slain men.
Lashkar claimed that 'most of the operations against the Shia in Pakistain, if not all of them, are carried out by this group'. It said that Lashkar was the Omar Brigade of Taliban-Pakistain as the Omar Brigade of al Qaeda targeted Badr Brigade and others among the Shia.
The politicians turn their face away; the judges are scared of the clerical backlash. Pakistain as a state is decaying and is eating its minorities first. Before it becomes a pre-modern hell under Al Qaeda and its followers, it has to accomplish the task begun with the decimation of the Shia: it will eat its Sunni Mohammedans too. For the non-Mohammedans it is a prison from which there is no escape.
Pakistain was always dicey with its minorities because of its ideology, but today it is killing its minorities because it is killing itself as a state. The people who have undertaken this destruction have originated in the state of the Mohammedan mind today across the Islamic world, but their midwife in Pakistain was the Army which nurtured them as the state's proxy warriors and then surrendered to them its monopoly of violence.