Daily Times

The Supreme Court (SC) has done the right thing by taking notice of Wednesday’s mob attack on a Hindu temple in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s (KP) Karak district and the local police force has also moblised quickly to make 14 arrests so far. The government, too, must waste no time at all in coming down visibly hard on anybody that disrupts the religious and sectarian peace and harmony that we as a nation have spilled so, so much blood for. It was the SC, after all, that in 2015 ordered the KP government to ‘restore and reconstruct’ the Hindu shrine after it had been illegally occupied by an influential cleric of the area. This recent vandalisation all these years later is, then, a severe indictment of the provincial as well as federal governments since they clearly failed to keep the place safe.

It is also very encouraging that the religious affairs minister, Noorul Haq Qadri, has spoken out loudly and very clearly that Islam forbids such attacks and that “protection of religious freedom of minorities is our religious, constitutional, moral and national responsibility.” It needs to be said in the strongest terms that it is just no longer acceptable that a few people can use the religion card to persecute and harass minorities and then go on to hold any sane voice that objects in contempt of the holy scripture itself.

It is the government’s responsibility now to make an example out of this particular issue. While the law will no doubt take its own course, the government must now gather prominent academic, political and religious leaders on one platform and construct a very powerful national narrative about social and religious tolerance and coexistence. Clerics like the one that led the mob on the Hindu temple have given not just our religion but also our country a very bad name for far too long. It is, after all, because of just such intolerance and xenophobia that India is the target of so much of our justified criticism. We must not allow ourselves to descend to such a level. Not just acceptance but celebration of our minorities was, in fact, the building block for Pakistan. Our founding fathers chose another country for Muslims because that was the only way to protect all religious and social denominations of the subcontinent within one country. We must take Pakistan back to its true direction. *