An unfortunate error

In a country where minorities of every description but particularly religious face discrimination every day of their lives, adding fuel to the discriminatory fires is never a good idea. Loss of life in attacks on minority groups, and not only religious minorities, is common. An area where there is widespread, indeed almost universal discrimination — is employment. There are millions of workers doing menial jobs for minimal wages, and some jobs appear to have become acculturated to particular minority groups. Advertisements for these small but important jobs appear regularly in the press, and an advertisement placed by the tehsil administration in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, District Bannu, has raised something of a furore.

The jobs on offer were 14 sweeper vacancies, permanent positions, at the Basic Pay Scale-2. The advertisement stated that the posts were open to ‘Christians, Hindus and Shias’. It also said that the posts were open to ‘all genders’ so long as they were in a specific age-band. This appears to be the first time that Shias have been specifically mentioned in such advertisements. It is unlikely that Shias are going to be happy to find themselves bracketed with other minorities in this way. The social media promptly and rightly lit up. There were hurried denials from all concerned saying that the advertisement was a mistake, that Shias should never have been mentioned and that a corrigendum will be published correcting the misinformation — but the damage has been done.

The public sentiment appears altogether more enlightened than the paradigm of those responsible for the advertisement, and is not buying the ‘clerical error’ story. The thrust of the public perspective is that the K-P administration should not be recruiting on the basis of minorities anyway, and that doing so merely reinforced perceptions of minority groups as in some way inferior, only worthy of the lowliest employment. This is a perception that this newspaper endorses. Even the head of the PTI, Imran Khan, Tweeted that he disapproved. It is precisely this kind of error — if it was an error and we have our doubts — that keeps hatreds alive. Cut the lame excuses and never let it happen again.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 22^nd, 2017.

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