By Raniya Khan

Among big-ticket issues of individual and national security, fundamental rights for minorities in Pakistan are often overlooked. The list of their deprivations are long, and media attention focuses on them when they are brutalized by law or persecuted in pogroms. But the fundamentals of their status as legal citizens always remain precarious, and often too contingent even in daily entitlements under the law. It can be as simple as registering a marriage: In Pakistan, for instance, registering a marriage between a Hindu woman and a Hindu man is just not possible. For any religious minorities, the inability to register their marriages and to enforce or contest the legality of their marriage certificates, amounts to denying them a fundamental human right. Yet, for religious minorities in Pakistan, legalizing their marriages has just not featured as a state priority. 

Apart from the nikkah naama for Muslim marriages and the certificate of marriage for Christian marriages, there is no process for registering marriages of other religious groups. Recently, the government did order NADRA (National Database Registration Authority) to accept the Sikh marriage certificate known as annand karraj as legally binding, after a meeting between Sikh officials and NADRA’s deputy chairman, Tariq Malik, but other groups still face problems. Hindus, Parsis and Baahi communities cannot produce any proof of marriage, which can cause a multiplicity of obstacles to obtaining state entitlements, including the right to vote. Sangeeta Devi said, “On not being able to produce marriage registration certificates, we are not entitled to get a CNIC, which in turn denies us the right to vote as well”[1]. 

Like all exclusions, this issue can hit women especially hard. As, Shami Mai, a poor Hindu woman from Rahim Yar Khan explained, “In case of separation or domestic violence, a Hindu woman cannot register a complaint in government departments because she does not have any legal document to establish the perpetrator as her husband”[2]. And in cases where the husband dies, the widow does not have access to his property or resources as she has no proof of their marriage. The Hindu community has been urging the government to pass a marriage act to legalize their marriages. Despite the Supreme Court’s suo moto ruling on November 23, 2010 and the Prime Minister’s acknowledgement that marriage rights for Hindus must be reformed, there has been no legal decision to date. 

The Supreme Court has asked for the issuance of a CNIC (identity card) for Hindu community members so that they can show some identification to avoid distress at the hands of the authorities. However, the continued absence of a marriage registration process is a cause of major concern as it "otherizes" the Hindu community by isolating them as non-citizens in their daily lives, leaving them wide open to official abuse. Naina Bai said, “If we travel or stay in a hotel, policemen and hotel administrations mistreat us. They become suspicious of our relation to each other”[3]. 

Shanktala Devi, a housewife, also complained of issues arising due to the absence of marriage registration. She reiterated the problems faced by women in particular, and expressed concern over divorced and widowed Hindu women who were not given any legal rights over the property of their husbands. She urged the government to address this pressing issue of the legality of registering their marriages in order for them to safeguard their rights. 

The Hindu population in Pakistan currently stands at over four million, making them the largest minority in the country.  Continuing to deny them basic marriage rights is clearly unacceptable, and the Supreme Court should press the government to enforce its ruling on the registration of their marriages before more members of the minority Hindu community are forced to migrate across the border due to oppression in Pakistan. 

In a moving testimony to such a litany of quiet exclusions, a journalist Kapil Dev said, “Our community members are migrating to other countries because they think that no one accepts them in Pakistani society”[4]. He was right. A clear example of the discrimination against minorities and the growing need to address their issues arose recently when a Hindu MPA from Singh migrated to India. Several members of parliament, from the Pakistan People’s Party in fact, were critical of their own government in the national assembly, expressing legitimate worry over the growing number of minorities fleeing from the country. 

At present, with the security situation as precarious as it is, minority issues meet a dead end even with citizen's groups seeking to defend their rights in a climate when bigots become heroes overnight, and vigilante mobs often dictate the agenda in small communities. In this backdrop, it is difficult to say when the question of the registration of minority marriages will be resolved. Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti’s murders show that minorities and their advocates, at least for now, are not safe in a country like Pakistan where religious identity continues to be conflated with citizenship. This is the fault line where Jinnah's vision for Pakistan is contested in daily battles for rights and entitlements in ordinary people's lives, with no access to justice or the state's resources. This is where advocacy must speak truth to power.

[1] http://tribune.com.pk/story/140805/hindus-demand-their-right-to-register-marriages/

[2] http://tribune.com.pk/story/140805/hindus-demand-their-right-to-register-marriages/

[3] http://tribune.com.pk/story/140805/hindus-demand-their-right-to-register-marriages/

[4] http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/5389/jinnahs-pakistan-has-no-room-for-hindus/

By Raza Rumi

Pakistan’s existentialist crisis is no longer a strictly Pakistani issue. Its potential repercussions have emerged as a cornerstone of global debates on regional stability and international concerns on terrorism and nuclear proliferation. The clichés on Pakistan’s disintegration and meltdown have also been done to death in the international media and policy brigades across the world. Perhaps, what the world has not yet fully comprehended is that Pakistan is essentially a transitional country where the old order is crumbling, giving way to a newer society that is grappling with geostrategic compulsions, domestic violence and a post-colonial state which refuses to realign its structures and priorities to a ‘new’ Pakistan.

To begin with, never in Pakistan’s history have so many women been active in the public spheres: from higher education to the workforce and from subaltern resistance movements to national politics. The two leading public sector universities i.e. the Karachi and Punjab Universities respectively, cater to a majority of female students. It is no coincidence that women parliamentarians are far more active in the national assembly and senate and not even shy of resisting patriarchy and clergy in their public roles. Increasingly, urban Pakistan is shedding its traditional conservatism by creating space for women’s inclusion in the media, and other segments of the services sector (also the largest contributing chunk of the GDP).

The impetus for this transformational moment can be located in the rapid urbanization that has taken place during the last two decades. Among South Asian countries, Pakistan is the most urbanized polity (officially 35% but unofficial estimates suggest it could be close to 50%), leaving India and Bangladesh behind. Villages of yester years are peri-urban settlements in rural Pakistan; and peri-urban is turning into what would be termed as ‘urban’. Furthermore, it is increasingly a country of young people. More than 65% of Pakistan is under the age of 26 and in another decade, the ‘youth’, their voice, concerns and energies would drive Pakistan. Already the signs of this under-studied revolution are exerting pressures of the ‘old’ Pakistan.

The brutal assassination of Federal Minister of Minorities, Shabaz Bhatti on March 2 2011, shook the entire nation and has left Pakistan’s Christian community feeling, if it were possible, more disenfranchised and threatened than before. Bhatti’s death came nearly a month after the equally bloody assassination of Punjab’s Governor Salman Taseer, who was gunned down by a member of his own body guard. Both assassinations are linked to Bhatti and Taseer’s vocal condemnation of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and their support of Aasia Bibi, the fourty six year old Christian labourer and mother of five, sentenced to death for blasphemy in November 2010.

It was reported today, that Interior Minister Rehman Malik has stated that a cross-party accord is to be reached to end misuse of the blasphemy law (Dawn). This proposal comes hot on the heels of Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) leader Maulana Fazl Rehman’s comment in the Assembly  that ‘if a law is being misused against minorities we are ready to discuss this (matter)’ (Dawn). Despite Rehman’s denial of the link between Bhatti and Taseer’s murders and their role in the debate on the amendment of the blasphemy law, the message to open the discussion on the blasphemy has obviously not gone unheard.

However, the nature of the ‘accord’ and related discussions is not clear.  The Blasphemy Amendment Bill, a private members bill submitted in November 2010 proposing to amend sections 295-298 of the Pakistan Penal Code and related sections of the Criminal Procedure Code, was met with a negative response from all sides. Support for amendments does not appear on any agenda and it is important to remember that the JUI-F led ‘Tahafuz Namoos-i-Risalat’ campaign was ended only when the Government categorically refused to amend the law.

While the Parliamentarians consider possibilities of consensus on the issue of the blasphemy, false accusations under the law are made regularly. On the day of Bhatti’s assassination, another violent attack served to highlight the urgent need for change. Muhammad Imran, a man charged with blasphemy in 2009 and later released by court order for lack of evidence was shot dead by two men in Rawalpindi. It is reported that one of the killers the complainant on the original blasphemy charge.

In the meantime, Aasia Bibi continues to languish in jail and has expressed sadness at the violent death of two of her ardent supporters and concern for her own safety. She is currently incarcerated in an isolation cell at Sheikhupura Jail, Punjab, where posters bearing images of Taseer and Bhatti with a large question mark and the caption ‘Who will be next?’ are plastered on the walls. Given that she may be the next target of radical Islamic groups, Aasia’s enhanced sense of fear is justified.

For further details please refer to the following documents:

List of recent cases 

References to blasphemy in the Quran

Qamar David

By Raza Rumi

In recent weeks, several commentators have dwelt upon the amorphous notion of ‘Jinnah’s Pakistan’, challenging its notional contours and exposing its overt ideological underpinnings. Whilst such a debate is healthy in a democratic society, it becomes a worrying sign in a deeply polarised polity such as Pakistan. Jinnah’s Pakistan was no consensus project: It had several dissenters — from the religious right to the Khudai Khidmatgars in the northwest. Perhaps these problematic foundations led to the capture of the state by a national security paradigm, later bolstered by the Islamist discourse.

Blaming Jinnah’s Pakistan as a cause or manifestation of the ideological chaos rooted in our perennial identity question is simply disingenuous. Jinnah may have said different things at different occasions but his views as head of the state are what matter. It was not Jinnah alone who created Pakistan. The politico-economic interests of nascent ‘Muslim’ bourgeoisie and the famous salariat (to use Hamza Alavi’s term) were the prime causes of Pakistan’s creation. Jinnah nearly gave up the idea of a separate state in 1946 after accepting the Cabinet Mission proposals (the best possible compromise to retain Indian unity). Many critiques of Jinnah overlook the ‘intransigence’ of the Indian National Congress, documented by HM Seervai. Sadly, both India and Pakistan have buried the fairly objective view of Seervai, as particularistic nation state narratives are always threatened by objectivity.