LAHORE: The Christian community has expressed its outrage at a recent advertisement by the Lahore Waste Management Company (LWMC).

According to the advertisement, the company first wishes the Christian community for the festival of ‘Maryamabad’ who will be on vacation and then goes on to give a public notice where, requesting people to throw rubbish only in trash cans as there will be no workers to pick up the trash on the occasion of festival.

The event is a three-day festival held in the village of Maryamabad where Christians, especially Catholics, from across the country visit a shrine dedicated to Mary.

The Christian activists and civil society representatives expressed their dismay at the content of the advertisement, saying this is yet another discriminatory public notice where Christians are regarded as ‘nothing more than rubbish pickers and sanitation workers’.

Recognising hue and cry on social media as well, PML-N MPA Mary James Gill also condemned the ad in the presence of Maryam Nawaz, saying it was clear discrimination against the Christians but the issue had already been taken up with the CM some years ago.

“The amendment to the Punjab service rules is already in place,” she said. “A similar ad was printed for Easter too but I believe that some kind of an apology will be published since PML-N leadership has taken notice of it.”

Michelle Chaudhry, who runs an education-based organisation called the Cecil and Iris Chaudhry Foundation, said this was not new.

“In 2015, an ad had appeared for a hospital where the job requirement said that ‘non-Muslims would be accommodated for posts of sanitary workers and jamadars,” she said. “In Bannu also, they had a similar ad but that time even included Shia Muslims in it. Later, they issued an apology but only for using the word Shia, not for the non-Muslims.”

“When our constitution is discriminatory, then this appears to be something very small,” says Rev. Faraz Malik.

Khalid Shahzad, human rights activist, however, had slightly different views. “I believe there is somewhat of an overreaction and I think it may be in context to the overall discrimination of Christians being slotted as sanitary workers,” he said. “But if a department is giving an awareness ad whose aim is to promote cleanliness, why is that bad?” he asks.

Published in Dawn, September 12th, 2017