Pakistan has missed out on being designated by the US State Department a Country of Particular Concern. The latter refers to Washington’s annual pinpointing of “governments that have engaged in or tolerated systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom”. Thus we have had to make do with the bottom-notch placing on a Special Watch List “for severe violations of religious freedoms”. Too bad. We say this not to be flippant. But given that this announcement coincided with the seventh death anniversary of Salmaan Taseer, the then sitting Governor of Punjab who was assassinated over his staunch defending of the country’s minorities — we would have hoped for a bit more gumption from our frenemies over in Washington. Especially after all that dreadful business with Captain (rtd) Safdar and his anti-Ahmadi vitriol. For we haven’t forgotten how he took to the National Assembly floor, no less, to call for a ban on this community from entering Pakistan’s armed forces and other key posts before declaring this beleaguered group “enemies of the nation”. Nor have we blotted out how his fellow parliamentarians allowed him to complete uninterrupted his incitement of religious hatred. That this happened in the Lower House means that for us this entire spectacle amounted to treason; nothing more, nothing less. We are of course mindful of how our Christian community bid farewell to the year gone by as they suffered an attack on a Methodist church in Quetta just a week before Christmas Day, the second most important date in their religious calendar. Yet there is slightly more discomfort in the knowledge that a sitting parliamentarian shares the same ideology as a global terrorist network. After all, it was a splinter group of the Pakistan Taliban that pledged spiritual allegiance to ISIS that targeted Christians on Easter Sunday back in 2016; the most significant date for this community. Thus we are disappointed that the US hasn’t taken a harder line against the right-wing religious agenda that brought the state to its knees at the end of last year. Ditto when it comes to the militant-mainstreaming project. But more than anything, we are overwhelmingly discouraged by the timing of the watch list shout-out. Naturally we understand that it is routine for such ‘classifications’ to come at this time; that is, after offering a review of different countries’ performances over the previous year. But given the ongoing fracas surrounding the most recent Trump Twitter storm — the Pakistani state has responded in the way that we all knew it would. It has dismissed the entire episode of the listing as being politically motivated. And while there is likely quite a bit of truth in this contention — the fallout is that the rights of the country’s minorities have now been firmly linked to an American ‘plan’ to destabilise Pakistan. This simply won’t do. Something else that isn’t really cricket is being lectured by a nation whose president may or may not be a white supremacist sympathiser. And one who, according to an unauthorised account of Trump’s first year in office, privately rationalised the KKK in the post-Charlottesville aftermath. * Published in Daily Times, January 7th 2018.