Pakistan: Remembering Charanjit Singh. By Khaled Ahmed
On May 22, a prominent
Sikh of Peshawar was shot dead in his shop. Charanjit Singh represented his
community as a member of Gurdwara Bhai Joga Singh, and was loyal to Pakistan.
He was not the first Sikh to be killed in Peshawar. A Sikh doctor, minister of
minorities of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, was killed in 2016 by the Taliban — it had
killed 10 Sikhs in 2013-14 as well.
The reaction to the
killing of Charanjit Singh has been intense grief. But the tendency to blame
someone else, and not the internal disorder, remains. Readers sending in their
reactions to newspapers mostly blamed “external enemies” while knowing that the
“internal” enemy, the Taliban, had killed Charanjit. The community was also
harassed in Kurram (tribal) Agency where the Taliban was also decimating Shias.
All minorities in Pakistan are at risk. In 2013, suicide bombers blew up the
All Saints Church in Peshawar, killing nearly 100 worshipers.
Pakistan can’t prevent
such killings because it has allowed sovereignty to flee most of its territory.
Its ideology causes certain elements to break loose from the law because they
disagree over the manner in which Pakistan enforces religious law. Al Qaeda
didn’t take long to make it public that Pakistan was not really Islamic. Among
several edicts it avoided enforcing was the abolition of modern banking. The
Taliban think Pakistan is a pagan country because it avoids implementing the
sharia.
The Taliban was born
of the idea of keeping the tribal areas as a kind of “tribal museum” without
proper administration, infrastructure and law. Soon the “wild” but pure warlike
people living in the tribal areas were somehow fighting the first Indo-Pak war
in Kashmir. Then, in 1970, the US and Saudi Arabia paid the tribesmen good
money to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. In time, they started spilling
into the settled areas and were soon counted the second largest ethnicity in
Karachi.
All over Pakistan,
madrasas indoctrinated the lower classes — who couldn’t afford to send their
children to school — in hard Islam that challenged the Islamic state for not
being Islamic enough. In 1947, there were only 137 madrasas in Pakistan. Nine
years later, a survey reported that the number of madrasas had increased to 244
in West Pakistan. By 1995, the figure stood at 3,906, increasing to 7,000 in
2000 and 35,000 by 2016. Poor Pashtun households adopted the madrasa as their
window to life. Husain Haqqani, in
Re-Imagining Pakistan, notes that at the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan some
members actually called for “arrangements by the state to facilitate ‘the five
times’ prayers and fasting’ and warned that ‘non-Muslims always take advantage
of our goodness’”. Pakistan legislated to make an insult to the Prophet PBUH
punishable with death to target Christians. But Muslims became victims of this
law too.
The killers who took
the life of Charanjit Singh in Peshawar were not persuaded by Pakistan’s
“foreign enemies” to commit the evil deed. He was killed by Pakistanis nurtured
on the ideology that subliminally refuses to accept non-Muslims in the “castle
of Islam”. The Christian church in Pakistan, still conscientiously educating
Muslims in their charity-run schools and colleges, has endured massacres of its
impoverished flock who sweep the roads of Pakistan. On 27 March 2016, 75
were killed and over 340 injured in a suicide bombing that hit the main
entrance of Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park, one of Lahore’s largest parks. The attack
targeted Christians who were celebrating Easter. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a Punjabi
group affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the
attack.
More articles by Khaled Ahmed
