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development: Repeal discriminatory legislation! —Syed Mohammad Ali

There remains an urgent yet unaddressed need for state policies to reflect the country’s diversity. Regulating madrassas, reforming the public education sector, and invoking constitutional restrictions against private armies and hate speech are essential steps to stem the tide of religious extremism

As if the militancy currently gripping the country were not enough, a mob in a remote village of Toba Tek Singh, angered by the alleged desecration of the Quran, torched 40 houses and a church, where seven people, including two children and an elderly man, were burnt to death.

Once this tragedy had occurred, the government moved quickly to try to limit the fallout of the anti-Christian violence, ordering compensation and inquiries into the situation and the mishandling of the incident.

However, politicians who fled to the scene have stopped short of pledging to scrap the blasphemy laws, which according to the religious affairs minister incur the risk of inciting an Islamist backlash that ‘will benefit militants and harm the cause of our Christian brothers’. Even top clerics in the country have decided to defend the blasphemy laws, even if some of them have admitted that these laws can be misused. Calling upon the authorities to take steps to prevent such misuses is a tall order, however, given the limited capacity of law enforcement agencies.

Conversely, entities like the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan are nonetheless calling for an immediate move to abolish the blasphemy laws, saying that the legislation is too arbitrary, which enables it to be easily exploited for personal enmity. Consider, for instance, that just three days after the Gojra incident, two people were killed in another Punjab town in what was a private dispute between an employee and a Muslim factory boss, but coloured by unfounded allegations that the businessman had desecrated the Quran.

Back in 1994, Amnesty International had urged Benazir Bhutto to change the blasphemy law as it was being used to terrorise religious minorities. While she succeeded in modifying the laws to make them more moderate, these changes were quickly reversed by the next government.

Besides reigniting the controversy surrounding the blasphemy laws, the Gojra incident has also given rise to a lot of other speculations. A senior Pakistan government official said that Islamist militants from groups linked to Al Qaeda and the Taliban were suspected of being behind the mob violence in Gojra. The possibility of hard-line militant encouragement of this incident, or even the presence of a foreign hand aiming to create a new front of religious unrest in Pakistan, cannot be ruled out.

However, the fact remains that the local administration did not respond quickly enough to prevent the initial signs of instigation from turning into a riot, and then leading to the tragedy of deaths of innocent people. While the situation in Pakistan is not as bad as the neighbouring countries, communal violence unfortunately does have somewhat of a history within our country.

Before recounting this history however, let us contextualise the presence of Christian minorities within this part of the world. The exact introduction of Christianity to South Asia is a debateable topic. Besides the early Syrian Christian communities, which are largely settled in South India, missionary activities accompanied colonising forces from Portugal, France and Britain. The latter brought Christianity into today’s Pakistan in the later 18th and 19th century, through the conversion of marginalised Hindu castes. While the vast majority of Hindus and nearly all Sikhs fled the country after Independence, the Christians remained in Pakistan.

Minorities make up less than five percent of Pakistan’s population. Christians are one of the largest minorities in Pakistan, and have contributed to the country’s national life. While some Pakistani Christians have distinguished themselves as professionals, largely this community remains marginalised and poor.

The problem of communal violence has gradually become a cause for more serious concern since the late 1980s. In subsequent years, Christians began being arrested on charges of blasphemy. In 1998, a Christian was accused by a neighbour of stating that he supported Salman Rushdie, the author of Satanic Verses. Lower appeals courts upheld the conviction. It was only in the Pakistan Supreme Court that the lawyer of the accused was able to prove how the accuser had used the conviction to force the accused man’s family off their land to acquire control of their property. A bishop in Faisalabad committed suicide to protest the execution of a Christian man on blasphemy charges. In 2005, Christian churches and schools in the city were destroyed after a Christian allegedly burnt pages of the Quran. The rise of militancy has also led to a heightened sense of fear among the minorities. Yet while numerous precautions have been taken across the country to protect other vulnerable segments of society, no such measures seem to have been put in place for the minorities.

It is about time that incidents of communal violence are placed in a wider context. Vested interests, misplaced strategic policies, discriminatory laws and authoritarianism, have all served to limit the space and scope for a culturally diverse and religiously tolerant state and society in Pakistan. Instead, hate-based ideologies have succeeded in nullifying the valuable cultural and intellectual heritage of the country. Unfortunately, pulpits have been often used to incite people against religious minorities as well as other Muslim sects within the country.

There remains an urgent yet unaddressed need for state policies to reflect the country’s diversity. Regulating madrassas, reforming the public education sector, and invoking constitutional restrictions against private armies and hate speech are essential steps to stem the tide of religious extremism. A range of human rights organisations and legal experts have made intermittent demands to do away with discriminatory laws or tried to safeguard victims of these repressive laws. Yet, the myopic politicisation of governance structures and the entrapment of government discourses in paranoid interpretations of national security made it difficult to implement required reforms. As a result, vulnerable groups like minorities and also women have continued to become easy targets of discrimination and violence.

If Pakistan is going to revive its sense of identity, as envisaged by the founding fathers of our nation, our leaders must rise to the task and take bold steps to review and repeal all sorts of discriminatory legislation. We, the citizens, must support not only these efforts, but also make supplemental efforts to inculcate a culture of tolerance within our own surroundings, so as to reverse pervading hate-based indoctrinations that can only increase social ghettoisation on the basis of religion and sect.

The writer is a researcher. He can be contacted at ali@policy.hu

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