On Easter day this April, the Lahore Waste Management Company (LWMC) placed an advertisement in mainstream newspapers to congratulate the Christian community in their celebration of their most sacred religious festival. However, the LWMC also advised Lahorites: “Today, on the occasion of Easter, almost 6,000 employees of the LWMC are on vacation. The people in general are requested not to throw garbage outside of their homes!” This implies that the most menial and dirty jobs are for Christians only. Contempt and degradation towards this minority is palpable. It not only shows a derogatory attitude towards a cumbersome profession but is also an insult to the dignity of human labour, so much flaunted by our ruling elites yet they have a deep-rooted condescension and spite for the proletariat. The racial and reactionary mindset of the ruling classes is graphically illustrated in this advert.The Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and other religious minorities of this country are brutalised by this increasingly theocratic state. They are not just victims of murder and torture in the garb of ‘blasphemy’, they are also subjected to a continuum of suffering — discrimination at work, in their neighbourhoods, in educational institutions, hospitals and are even denied access to charity schemes, especially those that are funded by Zakat money. Their marriage and divorce laws have become redundant due to scant offices and excessive costs well beyond their meagre incomes. In recent days there has been an increase in victimisation of the Hindus including abduction of young women, their forcible conversion and marriage. Migration of the Hindus from Sindh to India has increased manifold. Places of worship are continuously being targeted. Hindu temples are periodically burnt and desecrated, churches and even whole Christian neighbourhoods have been torched and turned to ashes. The Sikh gurdawaras have not been spared either but as the decay of society proceeds and the social malaise that has set in becomes thicker, more and more Islamic sects are being pronounced infidels, shrines, mosques and imambargahs are being blown up and the people praying there are being slaughtered. In addition, archaic blasphemy laws are being used for blackmail, extortion and to settle enmities, particularly regarding property and asset disputes. The generalised psyche encouraged by the clergy and the overbearing intelligentsia within society is increasingly seeing Christians and other religious minorities as inferior citizens. This turns them into easy targets of religious vigilantes and street thugs. Blasphemy laws are being used in more and more bizarre situations. A slip of the tongue on a television show or slogans against a police officer having the same name as a caliph can land you into this death trap of blasphemy. The lawyers of Jhang suffered this ordeal the other week.“ The less people know about how laws and sausages are made, the better they sleep at night,” a comment attributed to Bismarck, the 19th century German reformer and bourgeois revolutionist, could equally apply to the legal and constitutional conundrum in Pakistan. The vicious Zia dictatorship coarsened the 1973 constitution and riddled it with religious bigotry. None of the so-called civilian democratic, liberal and secular regimes bothered nor had the strength or the vision to remove these heinous laws from the constitution. The country is currently practicing several parallel legal systems with a large chunk of the legal system based on the old British Raj’s legal code. In addition, Islamic laws are prevailing with the collusion of the middle and lower rungs of the state and are lubricated even more with bribery. The persecution of minorities increases with the increase in reaction within the state and society. Although the introduction of the joint electorate was a step forward, it is a far cry from resolving the social prejudices and tyrannies faced mainly by downtrodden sections and classes amongst the religious minorities. The truth is that even if all the retrogressive anti-minority laws are removed and laws to protect them are introduced and invoked, it will not make much difference on the ground. A large section of the state that is supposed to execute and implement these laws is so biased against the religious minorities that the saviours often become the executioners. This is also true for large swathes of society, also passing through a phase of a mild reaction overshadowing it. After the atrocious assassination of Rashid Rehman, a human rights lawyer who defended a blasphemy accused, it was reported that out of the nearly 7,000 lawyers in Multan, there is not a single lawyer prepared to be a prosecution attorney in this gruesome murder trial.Recent developments show contradictory processes within society. On the one hand there is an increase in religious reaction and its tentacles of social fear have spread deep but, at the same time, the masses are disgusted with Islamic fundamentalism and religious bigotry. In recent history, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the real culprit who smeared politics with religion. Jinnah used to call Gandhi a cunning fox and that was not far from the truth. Gandhi had called for religious harmony and a brotherhood between Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and other religious communities of the subcontinent. Yet it was these very words that instigated religious strife and prejudices. The masses of the region had lived in harmony for a millennia but by uttering these ‘humanitarian’ words, Gandhi was introducing a new identity people did not give much attention to in the past. The British imperialists failed in their attempts to divide and rule on religious lines but Gandhi, as a local politician, succeeded in providing political division on the basis of religious identity. Others then followed and today this strife has exponentially expanded in all the countries of the region. India with a secular state and constitution has more religious violence than perhaps any other country in the world. In Pakistan, as the crisis intensified, Islam as a religion became more fractured into many sects and the ruling classes continued to divide the oppressed classes on the basis of religion and sectarianism for perpetuating their despotic rule. Even so-called secular leaders have not hesitated to misuse religion whenever a crisis or a movement threatened their grip on power. Elected representatives and the rich from various religions will side with the reactionary rulers. Their interests are one and the same. Although every reform is welcome, these cannot cut out the roots of religious prejudices entrenched in the system of today’s society. The only true salvation is class unity of workers and poor peasants. A new wave of class struggle is bound to erupt. It will need unity cutting across all the prejudices instilled, provoked and instigated by the religious toadies of the ruling classes. The wedge of religious discrimination has to be smashed to make the class struggle surge forward towards a revolutionary victory. The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com