On the Christian protests

The Christians of Punjab have finally stood up and the rest of us are afraid. After suicide bombings at two churches in Youhanabad on March 15 which luckily ‘only’ killed 16 people, the Christian community took to the streets. They burnt a couple of metro bus stations, blocked major roads in Lahore and managed to stop Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from inaugurating the Faisalabad-Multan motorway.
During the protests, a group of protesters also tragically lynched two men who had been arrested by police as ‘suspects.’ Television media turned from coverage of the attack to Pakistan’s cricket victory to focusing exclusively on the lynching. Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar claimed that the “[lynch] mob was promoting the agenda of terrorists.” These were brave words from a minister whose party’s leaders have been revealed to have once been negotiating with terrorists. Declaring this particular lynching as the “worst form of terrorism” this country has seen, Nisar argued that “this incident [the lynching] is a cause of humiliation for our country, police, courts and government.”
Here, he was right. But the humiliation was due to different reasons. The apathy of the government towards the country’s Christian population was responsible for the sense of hopelessness and fear that fuelled the condemnable lynching. The anger in the crowd had been driven by the fact that three of the four policemen deputed to the churches were watching the Pakistan versus Ireland match at a local dhaaba when the attack occurred. Thereafter, the cricket-fuelled apathy of the general populace was witnessed, as status updates and tweets of the cricket victory began to fill social media. It had been four hours since the attack took place. No one but the Christians were taking notice – and, of course, the Punjab police.
Someone must ask the interior minister why the two men were in police custody in the first place if they were innocent. The short answer is that the Punjab police has been happy to target any Pakhtun-looking man found in the vicinity of a terrorist attack on suspicion as a means of satisfying their superiors and the media that ‘progress’ has been made. Usually, the bearded men arrested have nothing to do with the said incident.
This racism against Pasthun and Afghan migrants across Pakistan and, specifically, in Lahore has been documented by a number of news reports. One trusted reporter tweeted that a Christian leader was blaming the Pakhtun shopkeepers in Youhanabad for instigating the terrorist attack. But are not the tactics employed by the state and the country-wide operation against Afghan migrants being held under the cover of an ‘anti-terrorist’ drive responsible for this racialised understanding of terror and its perpetrators.
What was more disturbing is that the Punjab Police played the same role it did after the Joseph Colony arson attack in March, 2013 which burned over a 100 Christian homes. When Christians took to the streets after the Joseph Colony attack police tear-gassed and baton charged them. Return to 2015, when Christians took to the streets after the Youhanabad church attacks police tear-gassed and baton charged them. Before the Joseph Colony attack, the police had politely told residents to empty the area to let the Muslim mob ransack their homes. Tear gas and batons were not available in anticipation of a mob they had been tipped off about.
The question is: where were our newly-stamped humanitarian Muslims when Joseph Colony was burnt? Where was their public anger when the Christian community in Gojra was brutally attacked in 2009? Where were they when 120 Christians were killed when a church in Peshawar was bombed in 2013? More specifically, since the outrage claims public lynching is worse than terrorism, where was all this anger when a Christian couple were lynched and burnt alive four months ago in district Kasur?
It is clear to the Christian community that no mainstream Pakistani is going to stand up for them. This is why their decision to stand up and protest against their institutionalised political and social suppression is a welcome step. One of the most hopeful signs is that they did not allow key Sharif ally and former minorities minister, Kamran Michael to enter Youhanabad. Michael is a key cog in extending the PML-N’s patronage structure in Lahore’s Christian community. Michael, it must be remembered, like the handful of Christians who make it into the assemblies, is a community representative selected by mainstream political parties. There have been no separate electorates for Christians since 2002 and before 1985.
In standing firm in the current set of protests, despite the barrage of opinion against them, the Christians of Lahore have shown remarkable resolve. This is the first and most important step to getting recognised as equal citizens in Pakistan. The second step is to find a way of electing leadership outside the structures of the state and their own clergy. In an earlier article on the Joseph Colony incident, I had commented that Christian politics was also shackled by the colonial interpretation of Christian theology that forbade questioning the state. In order for Christians to regain their rightful place as equal citizens, it is absolutely essential for them to break out of these shackles.
The communal colour being given to the Christian protests hides the biases that the Muslim middle to upper class of Pakistan has always harboured against them. Christians in Pakistan face triple discrimination: religion, class and caste. Mainstream media is harking us back to the depictions of communal violence that happened during Partition. After the recent church attack the Jamaat-e-Islami’s mouthpiece, Daily Ummat, carried the headline: ‘Christian mob burns two Muslims’.
This is being turned into a Christians versus Muslims issue, with Christians being constructed as the aggressors. Tweets from the Sipah Sahaba’s account confirmed this lens, but the fact is that once again the so-called TV watching, social network savvy peaceful Muslims are following their line. The fact is that it is mainstream Pakistani Muslims, not just the TTP and other militant Islamists, who have been fully complicit in the oppression, murder, lynching and daily humiliation of Pakistan’s Christian community.
The way out of this lies with the Christian community itself. They must not let the unfortunate lynching define the next steps their politics takes.
The writer is a lecturer at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore and a freelance journalist. Email: hr2353@columbua.edu Twitter: @hashimbr