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WHEN I visit the graves of loved ones in Karachi, I am forced to scramble over the higgledy-piggledy final resting places of many others buried there.
In a sense, our graveyards are a perfect metaphor for Pakistan: chaotic, overpopulated and neglected. Military cemeteries, on the other hand, are laid out in neat rows, and are generally looked after. This, too, says something about us: military cantonments stand in stark contrast to the messy civilian habitations that surround them.
Virtually all urban cemeteries have long been full, and you have to bribe the attendants to find a spot for a newly departed family member. They know which graves have not been visited for a long time, and sometimes create a new one by the simple expedient of moving the remains elsewhere. Frankly, I don’t want to know where.
Persecution of non-Muslims scarcely registers on our conscience.
While things are bad in Muslim graveyards, Christians have taken better care of their dead: witness the greenery and clear rows in Karachi’s Gora Qabristan. However, even this pleasant space is under threat from local encroachers.
Elsewhere, however, this minority community is being prevented from burying their dead by prejudiced locals. The Washington Post recently ran a long story about the plight of the Christians in the small Punjab village of Torey Wala where 150 families have been laying their dead to rest in a two-acre graveyard for generations.
One Christian villager was quoted by the WP: “We have dug each and every grave over three or four times. Sometimes we find bones, sometimes skeletons. So we had to look for a different place.” But when a kind Muslim landowner allowed them the use of another plot, and the Christians began levelling it, they were met by hundreds of angry Muslim neighbours who accused the Christians of “dishonouring their faith and bring harm to their graveyard”, claiming there were old graves on the land.
The owner insisted it had never been used to bury the dead, but this did not prevent 33 Christians of being charged with blasphemy; eight of them, including a 12-year old boy, were jailed. Even though the charges have now been dropped, there is no prospect of the victims getting a new graveyard in the area.
In cities, Christians face the threat of criminal qabza groups grabbing their cemeteries and carving them up into residential and commercial plots. Lahore’s Shahpur Kanjra district has a graveyard where Christians have buried their dead for two centuries. Six years ago, a developer claimed the land belonged to him and threatened to bulldoze it; while local Christians have gone to court to block this land-grab, some of the land has already been taken over.
In Pakistan, it seems that the discrimination the minorities face every day of their lives follows them into the grave. Given our rapidly rising population, and the fact that cremation is not an option in Islam, I often wonder where the dead will be buried in the coming years.
The WP article goes on to document all the other indignities and the violence Pakistani Christians — as well as our other minorities — are subjected to every day. It also discusses the effects of our blasphemy laws in compounding the problems non-Muslims face in today’s intolerant Pakistan.
None of this is new to us. In fact, we have become so hardened to stories about the persecution of non-Muslims by individuals, groups and the state that they scarcely register on our consciousness or our conscience. A news story about the murder of a couple of Christians (or Hindus or Shias or Ahmadis or Sikhs) is usually tucked away on page six, and is never the subject of a TV discussion.
But we are not alone in targeting minorities. In Egypt, Copts are being persecuted; in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Christians have been driven from their homes; recently, the Islamic State killed hundreds of Yazidis, while kidnapping hundreds more of their women and selling them as slaves.
Imagine a similar sustained pogrom directed against Muslims in the West. Presently, the slightest anti-Muslim incident is magnified and made the subject of violent protests across the Islamic world. I dread to think what would happen if Muslim graves were desecrated, and the remains of the dead removed to make room for a shopping mall.
A heartbreaking appeal made its way into my inbox recently; for me it sums up the pain and the suffering of Pakistan’s vulnerable communities. It is signed by eight Christians who work for a company providing sanitary services to a leading industrial group in Lahore.
The signatories complain that another company providing similar services to the same customer feeds its (Muslim) staff, but the Christians don’t get any food. They also only get one day off on Christmas, and are marked absent if they take a holiday on 26 December.
The appeal ends: “Our basic rights are being violated. Please take necessary action.” I only wish I could.
Published in Dawn, October 25th, 2014
