KUDOS TO INDIANS

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2020/02/29/kudos-to-indians/

Thousands of brave Indian citizens have condemned the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in India at their own peril, seeing that Indian authorities have banned protests against it. Scores of people have lost their lives protesting. In Delhi alone at the time of writing this column, after around 40 people have died as a result and more than 500 people have been arrested. There have been more in the rest of India.

By now we all know what the CAA means, that it allows illegal immigrants to India access to citizenship so long as they are not Muslim, Sri Lankan Tamils, Buddhists from Tibet, or Rohingya from Myanmar. In other words the Act is based on religious discrimination which not acceptable on any level.

Other Indians around the world have also protested against the CAA. Kudos to them all for standing up for what is right.

There have also been vociferous statements by Pakistani authorities, including posters against the CAA in the cantonment in Lahore, and many self-righteous, indignant comments against the government of India in newspapers.

While all protest against the CAA is commendable the authorities in Pakistan seem to suffer from a myopic vision, as do the people who make these angry comments in newspapers hurling taunts at the country across the border, its people and government. You wonder just where they were when very similar things happened in Pakistan itself.

Yes, the CAA is against the secular constitution of India. So is the Pakistani passport form, the one you must fill out if you need a Pakistani passport, because all Muslim applicants must fill out the following section. Here is what it says for anyone who has not noticed:

I am a Muslim and believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of the prophethood of Muhammad (Peace be upon Him) as the last of the Prophets. (ii) I do not recognize any person who claims to be a prophet in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever after Muhammad (peace be upon him) or recognize such a claimant as a prophet or a religious reformer as or a Muslim. (iii) I consider Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Quadiani to be an imposter Nabi and also consider his followers whether belonging to the Lahori or Quadiani group to be non-Muslim.

It seems that to obtain Pakistani citizenship one must first, as the very first act, condemn a group of people and their set of beliefs, and set one’s signature against this condemnation to attest to that fact.

For all those so outraged at what is happening in India, where is the condemnation for the discrimination against the Ahmadiya sect? There was little when this group of people were discriminated against. Or when the Shias were being killed and driven out, as were the Hazaras.

There was not as much protest for what was done to Asia Bibi when she was imprisoned for ten long years as a result of a conviction for blasphemy by a Pakistani court based on frail evidence. Several maulvis even posted rewards for her murder. When she was finally acquitted by the Supreme Court she left the country for Canada. The few people who stood up for her included the then Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti and Punjab Governor Salman Taseer who were both assassinated for their courage. Many more protests than those against Asia’s incarceration attended the execution of Taseer’s murderer Mumtaz Qadri, gatherings of tens of thousands of people who caused a great deal of damage as a result of which the Army needed to be called in. Qadri’s burial place somewhere near ‘Pindi has become a pilgrimage site and is visited by scores of people every day.

In 2013 the poverty-stricken Christian Joseph Colony was attacked in Lahore. The excuse was alleged blasphemy committed by one of the residents, Sawan Masih, a young man with small children. Two churches were attacked, and many homes were torched. Most of the attackers were acquitted but Sawan Masih was arrested; and remains in prison today. Meantime today President Arif Alvi in a tweet called the vandalising of a mosque in Delhi a “disgraceful act”.

To deny these events or to close one’s eyes to their taking place is like Donald Trump denying that the USA has made discriminatory moves against Mexicans. Or the Germans refusing to accept their anti-Semitic past. Or the government of Myanmar denying that it had anything to do with the sudden influx of Rohingya Muslims into Bangladesh.

What prevents the authorities in Pakistan from doing something about the discrimination in their own country? These are undeniable, factual events. They are recorded in people’s memories, and in the media – the same media that is so muzzled today, in black and white.

To acknowledge the problem is step one. Only a fear for their own safety can stop this step being taken, or perhaps the fact that the authorities participate in the discrimination. No Madina ki riasat this. Not by a long chalk.