Khaled Ahmed: Separate, but not different. India takes stock after Dadri, Pakistan’s minorities languish under the law
Pakistani judges don’t shy away from announcing personal
piety in their judgments, and no one protests the injustice dished out to
people who can’t be considered pious because they are non-Muslim. That’s what
happens when you found a state on religion. On August 23, Dawn reported what
Hindus of Karachi felt was happening to them. You have to harden your heart to
read this. Those in India who feel bad about the Dadri lynching will empathise
with this Karachi community. Are we separate without being different?
In Karachi’s Jogi Morr in Qayyumabad there are slums where
human beings live in excrement. The slum is worse than usual because the
inhabitants are Hindus. It has been home to 4,000 Marwari-Gujaratis for the
last 60 years. They must have moved to Karachi from the desert, their original
home. Their leader, Krishan Bhandari, says the locality gets no water or
electricity for days. “Our children left school because they don’t have
identity cards as Hindus, and problems of livelihood have escalated because not
a single government team has visited since 2008 when 10 per cent of us procured
cards,” he says.
Why no ID cards? Because someone especially pious — probably
a bearded, middle-aged, born-again Muslim in the card-issuing authority, Nadra
— asked for documentation the Hindus simply can’t procure. He makes them visit
his office again and again so that he can reject their paperwork and refuse
them ID cards. He asks them to bring “certified marriage certificates”. Any
sane person would laugh at the demand; but Pakistan has gone insane with
religion.
Bhandari asks: “Where is the law that grants Hindu marriage
permits?” Muslims have marriage (nikah) documentation centres, but the state
forgot to arrange something like that for non-Muslims too. What is more, state-run
hospitals refuse treatment to Hindus because charity treatment is funded by an
Islamic tax called zakat, which cannot be given to non-Muslims — a medieval
throwback to times when non-Muslims were not full citizens.
Twenty-year-old Dhaniya, supporting a family of eight,
worked in a factory till he was dismissed for not having an ID card. So how
does one survive as a Hindu in this slum? One borrows, after which one becomes
a bonded slave worker. In Lahore, a Christian couple, Shama and Shahzad, paying
off debt while working at a brick kiln in Kot Radha Kishan, was accused of
blasphemy in November 2014. A mob of pious Muslims beat them to death before
burning them in the brick kiln. The government took action, locked up the
kiln-owner, who was ripping off bonded labour, and rounded up the mob. A
similar case came up in Kabul, Afghanistan, in which another pious mob killed
and burned a girl falsely accused of blasphemy.
After this, ironies crowd in, which a dysfunctional
religious state can’t grasp. As the Christian couple burned, their children
were saved and sent away by their grandfather, Mukhtar Masih, to their uncle’s
home. The four children of Shama and Shahzad were adopted by the Cecil and Iris
Chaudhry Foundation, run by Cecil Chaudhry’s daughter, Michelle Chaudhry, to
allow them to survive and get educated. Here the irony strikes thick and fast:
Cecil Chaudhry was Pakistan’s ace pilot who shot down so many Indian jets that
he was awarded the highest military award of the country. After retiring from the
air force, he ran Lahore’s St Anthony’s High School and its dozens of branches
open to Muslims in smaller towns. Pakistan’s prime minister went to that
school.
In the book, The Independence of India and Pakistan: New
Approaches and Reflections (2013), edited by Ian Talbot, it is surmised that
“the origin of Christianity in Punjab is dated back [by some writers] to the
work of St Thomas in the first century AD”. In 1947, Christians, led by their
leaders in Lahore, opted to stay in Pakistan because Muslims accepted “the
people of the book” and had a common belief in some of their prophets.
They had no idea that Pakistan would someday have a
blasphemy law targeting Christians, who would not be saved by judges
publicising their piety with beards and convicting innocent Christians,
including children, for fear of being mauled by mobs sent by jihadi non-state
actors. In the first week of December 1997, the archbishop of Canterbury,
George Carey, visited Pakistan. After meeting with the church officialdom, he called
on the government in Islamabad to repeal the blasphemy law because it had
become the cause of persecution of Christians in Pakistan.
The Urdu press reacted angrily and got a variety of ulema to
issue statements against the archbishop. The English-language press was
positive and recorded the archbishop’s appeal faithfully. The Urdu press was on
the verge of being abusive, printing statements asking him to go away. Have
South Asian mother tongues gone toxic?
The writer is consulting editor, ‘Newsweek Pakistan’.
