JUBAIL, SAUDI ARABIA: A few kilometres from the place in Lahore where in 1940, the Muslim League demanded partition of British India to create a homeland for minority Muslims, a charged mob of thousands of people chased out local Christians from their homes and later looted and burned their homes to ash. Is history repeating itself? Should the minorities in today’s Pakistan demand a separate homeland for themselves? Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif took immediate notice of the incident and set up a five-member committee to look into the matter. He also announced that no one would be permitted to destroy religious harmony in Punjab. While appreciating his noble statements, may I ask Mr Sharif whether the miscreants will require his permission to harm the minorities in his province? We understand that he was forced to issue such a statement as we are now in an election year; otherwise, what happened in Lahore is no different from the ugly events in Gojra in 2009.
I would like to ask the chief minister how many miscreants, as he likes to call them, were charged and put behind bars for looting and murdering Christians in Gojra. Where was he when another mob of fanatics, in November of last year, attacked and burned down a girls’ school in Lahore? The school’s 77-year-old principal was booked in a blasphemy row over a piece of homework issued by a teacher. Has the chief minister taken any action against the mob that lynched and burnt alive a deranged person for alleged blasphemy? What about action against the killers of 80-year-old Iqbal Butt, who was acquitted by court in a blasphemy case?
Who will trust Mr Sharif while there are people in his province who are working overtime to ‘purify’ the country — to make it literally, the land of the pure — and he does nothing about it. How can we Pakistanis criticise Narendra Modi for the Gujarat riots?
Masood Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, March 12th, 2013.
