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7,000 Christians booked under Hudood Ordinance, says APMA

By Shahid Husain

KARACHI: About 2,000-2,500 Christians in Sindh and nearly 5,000 in Punjab have been suffering since 1986 under the Hudood Ordinance, Michael Javed, president of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA) and a former member of the Sindh Assembly, told Daily Times on Monday.

The police have booked these people on false charges of adultery, kidnapping and violating prohibition, he said.

“The Hudood Ordinance, which was promulgated in 1986 during the era of General Ziaul Haq, is a discriminatory law and is badly affecting minorities,” he said. “If a minority community woman is raped, she needs the evidence of four Muslim adult males,” he said.

He said the Christian community, which played an important role in the creation of Pakistan, was condemned to live in constant fear due to discriminatory laws. “Neither can there be a Christian judge in a Shariat Court nor can a Christian lawyer plead a case there,” he said.

He claimed the discrimination against Christians could be gauged from the fact that during the colonial era the maximum punishment for blasphemy was 10 years, but now it was life imprisonment or death penalty. He said the Christian community could not even think of blasphemy. He said during 1947-1985 there were only seven cases of blasphemy registered in Pakistan, but today as many as 4,000 people had allegedly been implicated in blasphemy cases in Punjab and 1,200 in Sindh. He said Christians in Punjab had been particularly implicated in blasphemy cases, and in Sindh it were mostly Muslims. “Not a single case of blasphemy has been proved since 1986, but people booked under this law are suffering immensely,” he said. He claimed there were incidents when these people were killed even in jails.

He was of the view that judges in the lower courts faced undue pressure from the right-wing mullahs and said, “a Lahore High Court judge who acquitted a person involved in blasphemy was murdered a few years ago.”

“Pakistan came into being with the contribution of the minorities. Minority leaders including, C Gibbon and S P Singha, who were members of the Punjab assembly, had cast their votes unconditionally in favour of Pakistan in 1946,” he said: adding: “There were four votes from the minority community and they were decisive votes.”

He said Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah was for a secular and democratic Pakistan, but people, he claimed, who succeeded him transformed the country into a theocratic state.

“President General Pervez Musharraf has given 33 percent representation to women, but there is not a single women who has been elected on the reserved seats from the minority community,” he deplored.

He said the minority community had only 10 seats in the National Assembly, which was “totally unjust.” He added even people of the Federally-Administrated Tribal Areas had nine seats in the National Assembly and nine in the Senate, although they were fewer in number than the minority community.

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