Daily Times

ISIS is reportedly winning the war in Quetta. After all, according to media accounts, its relentless targeting of Christians there has prompted the beleaguered community to begin fleeing the city.

The terror group bombed a Quetta church in the run-up to Christmas and gunned down four members of a family a day after Easter. All of which is a sign to the 50,000-strong Christian community that they are not welcome. It is a message that echoes the plight of minorities across the Middle East in Iraq and Syria.

To be sure, this represents a stain on the record of the Pakistani state. For it signals the failure of the body politic to uphold its constitutional obligations to provide religious protection for all of the citizenry, equally. And what emerges is the triumph of support for a religious right wing agenda.

Had the state stood with those under fire, this would have considerably weakened the outreach of this and other terror outfits, if not capability. One only has to look at Europe to understand this. For when such groups hit — they strike the majority. Thus it is easy for the governments of Paris or London to unite their people against those who would do them harm; while paying tokenism to the blight of Islamophobia.

Here in Pakistan, things could not be more different. Sadly. Indeed, this is what the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) warns in its 2017 annual report. Whereby it notes that by the end of the first forty years of Independence — minorities went from constituting 20 percent of the population to just three. Similarly, it points to an increasing number of refugees seeking asylum in Europe. This should be a matter of immense shame for a nation fixated on showing only its soft side to the world at large. Yet faith-based violence continues unabated. Indeed, the HRCP goes as far as to say: “Extremist forces bent on creating an exclusive Islamic identity for Pakistan appear to have been given a free hand. A few hundred fanatics held the capital and the garrison cities hostage for 23 days in Faizabad, Islamabad in November this year until their demands were accepted. In ceding to the demands of the violent demonstrators, the state has virtually given blanket licence to fundamentalism and militancy in the name of religion.” Before concluding that this impunity has permitted terrorist outfits to proudly and confidently claim responsibility of murderous bigotry. And all the while no action is even taken against the latter’s social media accounts.

The state is understandably up against it; perhaps more so than its European counterparts. That is understood. Yet much more needs to be done to protect the right to life, liberty and property of all. For these are fundamental norms; the absence of which will merely provide the international community with greater reason to berate Pakistan. And that is something that no one should want.  *

Published in Daily Times, April 26^th 2018.