At one time Pakistan was seen as a safe refuge for Christians. No longer. Today it is one of the leading persecutors of Christians in the world. According to Open Doors, Pakistan is seventh on its Watch List. Christians in Iran and Afghanistan face less persecution than the Christians of Pakistan.
Ongoing Persecution
Cases such as that of Asia Bibi, who was sentenced to death under Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws, are well known. Mostly unreported in the West by a media which has little interest in the suffering Church, prejudice and persecution are endemic throughout Pakistan.
Christian women and girls are particularly vulnerable. Reports indicate a silent epidemic of kidnappings, forced marriages and forced conversion of Christian girls and women. The state authorities do little to counter this practice.
Typical is the case of Arzoo, a 13-year-old Catholic girl, who was kidnapped by a 44-year-old Muslim man. Two days later, Arzoo’s father was informed that the abductor had produced a marriage certificate stating Arzoo was 18 and had converted to Islam. Sindh High Court gave custody to the ‘husband’, who was already married with children. After an outcry in Pakistan as well as elsewhere, Arzoo was released, but only after being raped by her ‘husband’. No charges were brought. The kidnapper has two brothers who work with the Sindh police.
Reports indicate a silent epidemic of kidnappings, forced marriages and forced conversion of Christian girls and women.
This case is mirrored by that of Saima Javaid, another 13-year-old Christian girl kidnapped by two Muslim men and forced to convert to Islam and ‘marry’ one of them. According to a study by the Movement for Solidarity and Peace Pakistan in 2014, every year approximately 1,000 Christians and Hindus, primarily girls and young women, are abducted, sexually assaulted, forcefully converted to Islam, and married to their abductors. In the majority of cases the victims are intimidated into silence and remain captive.
How Did This Happen?
Many Pakistani Christians trace their religious heritage to the work of Western missionary societies during the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Punjab region of British-ruled India.
Early missionary work by the British and Americans in Hindu-majority India focused on upper-class Hindus on the assumption that the elites would use their influence to convert members of the lower castes. This proved ineffective and failed to break down the caste barriers. There are probably more than 3000 castes in India: each caste has a particular occupation, although not all members need practise it. Those in the lowest castes are allotted work considered ‘polluting’, such as working with hides, removing bodies of the unclaimed dead and cleaning toilets. Castes are rigid categories and even today upward mobility is still strenuously blocked.
Those in the lowest castes are allotted work considered ‘polluting’, such as working with hides, removing bodies of the unclaimed dead and cleaning toilets.
In the late 19th century, Western missionaries in India changed their tactics to focus on the least advantaged, and began to work amongst the Dalits, Hindus of low or no caste who are considered ‘untouchable’. The success of this change of tactic can in part be put down to the fact that it offered an escape from the caste system (Gal 3:28). One example of this tactical success is that by the 1930s almost all members of the Chuhra, the largest menial caste in the Punjab, had converted to Protestant Christianity.
Christians in the New Pakistan
Partition in 1947 caused the greatest migration in history as Hindus and Muslims chose either majority-Hindu India or majority-Muslim Pakistan. The section of the Punjab where most Christians lived became part of Pakistan, and most Punjabi Christians opted to stay in Pakistan. They believed they would be safer there than in caste-ridden India as, at least in principle, Islam rejects social divisions like castes on theological grounds.
Unfortunately, nothing much changed, either economically or socially for Pakistan’s Christians. To have Dalit, or untouchable, ancestry remains a stigma in the country. After partition, the ruling Muslim League found Punjabi Christians a useful substitute for filling menial jobs left by fleeing Hindus. The new state uprooted hundreds of thousands of Christians from villages in central Punjab and pushed them into these occupations. Today most Pakistani Christians in urban centres are still consigned to poorly paid jobs in the sanitation industry.
Today most Pakistani Christians in urban centres are still consigned to poorly paid jobs in the sanitation industry
Professor Salamat Akhtar, a former professor of history at Gordon College in Rawalpindi, says that as president of the All Pakistan College Teachers’ Association, he met the education secretary in Islamabad in 1980. ‘Not knowing I was a Christian, he said the government was worried that a large number of Christians were obtaining education… If all Christians were educated, then no one would be left to sweep the roads and pick up the garbage.’
Only 3.27 per cent of urban Pakistanis living in Punjab province are Christian. Yet in Lahore, Punjab’s capital city, about 6,000 out of 7,894 sanitation workers, or 76 per cent, are Christians. Such sanitation work, as well as being demeaning and underpaid, can have fatal consequences. Irfan Masih, a Punjabi Christian sanitary worker, died in June 2017 after being denied timely treatment by Muslim doctors, who were fasting and refused to touch his ‘unclean’ body.
Official Prejudice
Pakistan’s government practises a policy of reserving sanitation posts for religious minorities. Newspaper adverts for sanitation workers, including those placed by government agencies, reserve sanitation jobs for non-Muslims. In 2019 the Swabi district council in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa unanimously passed a resolution declaring that only Christians should be hired as sweepers in the district’s hospitals. They further demanded that any Muslims employed as sweepers be transferred to other posts, such as that of a guard. Islamabad’s Capital Development Authority (CDA) has 1,500 sanitation workers, and all of them are Christians.
Pakistan’s government practises a policy of reserving sanitation posts for religious minorities.
One of Asia’s Catholic news agencies, UCANews, reported that in May 2017 the Hyderabad Municipal Corporation issued a call for 450 sanitation workers, offering contracts that required employees to be non-Muslim and to take this oath: ‘I swear by my faith that I will only work in the position of a sanitary worker and not refuse any work.’
Deadly church bombings in Pakistan may hit the headlines momentarily, but day by day, from false accusations of blasphemy to the kidnapping of young girls and forced conversion, the Christians of Pakistan are held down and made to know, whatever the law says, that they are discriminated against, scorned as unbelievers, and are second-class citizens.
The Rev. Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack is a retired Church of Scotland minister; now a member of the Free Church of Scotland. Check out his many incisive articles on his blog, A Grain of Sand.
