Arun Anand
The movement for the creation of Pakistan out of the larger landmass of India was based on the (in)famous ‘two-nation theory’ that positioned Hindu and Muslim as two irreconcilable identities, and therefore, deserving separate homelands. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the struggle for Pakistan, envisaged it as a Muslim-majority homeland but one that housed and treated equally other minorities as well.
However, since the early days of the establishment of the new country, the tone was set when it declared itself as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan under the 1956 constitution, barring non-Muslims from becoming President or Prime Minister. The partition of the Indian subcontinent had wreaked grotesquely inhuman carnage, killing between 1 million to 2 million people and uprooting around 15 million people on both sides of the border. Ever since then the religious minorities in Pakistan such as Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs continued to face existential threats, shrinking demographically and politically.
The onslaught confronted by religious minorities in Pakistan is reflected in the distressingly marginal increase in their population since the country conducted its first census in 1951. Religious minorities, which constituted only 3.12% of West Pakistan’s total population in 1951, could only grow to 3.72% by 1998. This 1998 census put the Hindu population in Pakistan at around 2 million, however, it was shown to increase to only 3.5 million in the 2017 census, that is, in almost 20 years. In fact, a comparison between the 2017 and 2023 census figures reveals that the Hindu share of the total population declined from 1.73% to 1.60%. The Christian population in the same period was also shown to have marginally risen from 1.27% to 1.59%. The Sikhs, despite their relentless demands, are not given a separate column for documentation, and are clubbed under the category of ‘others’. Nonetheless, the NADRA (National Database and Registration Authority) shows only 6,146 registered Sikhs in 2021, a gigantic downgrade from their numbers before the partition. In contrast, in India, Muslims, who are the largest minority group, registered a 4.4% increase, from 9.8% of the total population in 1951 to 14.2% in 2011.
There are multiple reasons behind Pakistan’s pathetic demographic statistics. However, they can mostly be summed up in two factors- institutional discrimination and blatant impunity or even encouragement to radicalized social elements. Over the years, increased space to radical Islamist parties for political expediency or regional geopolitics has meant that the ‘Islam is in danger’ narrative that was employed to demand Pakistan has been sharpened to vilify ethnic, sectarian, and religious minorities. Attacks on minority places of worship have become routine, amid frequent reports of abductions, forced conversions, lynchings, and open calls for genocide.
Among the nearly 4 million Hindus in Pakistan, around 90% live in the Sindh province. According to a report, it is estimated that around 1,000 Pakistani women and girls from religious minority groups between the ages of 12 and 25 are abducted, forcefully converted to Islam, and married to their abductors every year. This criminal practice, called a ‘human-rights catastrophe’ by the report, is most acute in the Sindh province, and although girls from all religious minorities are subjected to this brutality, it is most commonly enacted on Hindu girls. Around 20-25 Hindu girls are estimated to be kidnapped and converted in Sindh every month, which means that their already limited access to education, healthcare, and other public facilities is even more curtailed due to a prevalent fear of abduction. The police and judiciary often exempt the perpetrators who many times enjoy social influence and support for ‘scoring’ a conversion to Islam.
Another major weapon that has been widely deployed in Pakistan to persecute minority groups has been the notorious blasphemy law. The blasphemy law, although in existence since colonial times when its purpose was to avert inter-religious conflict, was given an extremely harsh form under the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq who is known for institutionalizing Islamization in Pakistan. The law has been weaponized to frivolously accuse persons from minority groups, most prominently Christians, spawning a culture of vigilantism, lynchings, glorification of perpetrators, and expulsion of persecuted people from the country. Prominent political figures such as the former governor of Punjab Salman Taseer and former Federal Minister for Minorites Shahbaz Bhatti have been assassinated for opposing the law, and judges who either convict vigilantes or acquit the falsely accused have to flee the country to save their lives. The pervasive misuse of the law is illustrated by the fact that since the 1920s till 1986, only 14 cases of blasphemy had been reported under the law, whereas at least 1,472 people have been charged under the same between 1987 and 2016. Even more disturbingly, at least 70 people have been reportedly murdered over blasphemy accusations since 1990, including the Sri Lankan Christian worker Priyantha Kumara.
In addition to this, attacks on minority places of worship are frequent, however, those have never been tried under the blasphemy law in Pakistan. In August 2023, the fundamentalist group Tehreek-e-Labbaik reportedly led attacks in the Jaranwala area of Faisalabad in Punjab and ended up burning 21 churches and hundreds of Christian houses, over an allegation of blasphemy. A month prior to that, the 150-year-old Mari Mata temple of Karachi was destroyed and 2 days later, dacoits attacked a Sindh temple with rocket launchers.
The Pakistani state has subjected its religious minorities to structural discrimination in every sphere. From vilifying them in school textbooks, underrepresenting or tokenizing them in government bodies, to systematically promoting their persecution through fundamentalist proxies, it has forced many people from the minorities to seek refuge out of the country. In the words of Pakistan’s former minister and media advisor to the President, Farahnaz Ispahani, the state has been enacting ‘drip-drip genocide’- a form of slow genocide- against its minorities, as it seeks to ‘purify’ Pakistan which literally translates to ‘the land of the pure’.
(Author is a senior journalist & columnist. He has authored more than a dozen books)