Election platforms for minorities keep increasing but they are seldom adhered to
A boy waves the national flag as supporters of Pakistan’s former prime minister and leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, listen to his speech during a by-election campaign meeting in Karachi on Oct 14, 2022. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) was founded in 1996 by Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, who served as the country’s prime minister from 2018 to 2022. (Photo: AFP)
Pakistan practices religious segregation which puts minorities at the receiving end. With national polls around the corner in the South Asian nation, minorities are looking forward to some respite from the divide-and-rule strategy of the powerful religious and political elite.
Despite Islamization directly enshrined in the constitution, preventing equal rights for all citizens, political parties time and again have come out with pledges and action plans as poll platforms to end religious discrimination. However, they are seldom put into practice once a new government is cobbled together.
Former prime minister, Imran Khan, and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) ruled the nation for three and a half years, but kept none of five poll platforms listed in their election manifesto to empower minorities and protect their rights.
Khan, who survived an assassination attempt last year, had pledged to set up a legally empowered National Commission for Minorities (NCM), equal access to justice, laws against hate speech, minority quotas and the promotion of interfaith dialogue.
However, hardly any of them got going during his tenure from 2018 to April 2022.
As the national polls are slated for August this year, an NCM is yet again finding favor with politicians to woo minorities.
“Political parties in Pakistan have made tardy progress in reforming controversial colonial-era legislation”
Addressing a Christmas function, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said an NCM draft had been prepared and soon it would become law.
Before the federal assembly completes its five-year term in August, minorities are hoping to see a powerful NCM replace the current toothless and ad-hoc body, which was reconstituted in May 2020.
The Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), when led by former prime minister, Nawas Sharif, made educational quotas for minorities a priority in two elections. But the longest-serving Pakistani prime minister never bothered to adhere to them during his nine-year stint in office. The PML-N is currently ruling Pakistan with Nawaz’s brother, Shehbaz, occupying the top job.
When it comes to wiping out discrimination under the infamous blasphemy laws that carry a potential death sentence for anyone who insults Islam, political parties in Pakistan have made tardy progress in reforming controversial colonial-era legislation.
The fate of forced conversions and protection of religious prayer houses is also the same.
Deployment of security personnel at places of worship has not prevented them from becoming targets of mob violence and courts in the country are still clueless about forced conversions due to the absence of specific laws.
When it comes to the five percent minority job quota, another poll platform, the parties often sulk. Though several interfaith events, including Christmas cake-cutting ceremonies, to promote religious tolerance are held, they lack substance to percolate down.
The number of pledges focusing on the socio-economic upliftment of minorities keeps increasing with each election, and promises do keep getting widened in scope when elections are around the corner as minority voters can tilt the balance in numerous constituencies.
“Political parties are finding core issues of religious freedom and equality too hard to digest and difficult to put into practice”
According to the Election Commission of Pakistan, there are 4.11 million registered voters belonging to minority communities. In the vital province of Punjab, they have 1,703,782 votes, 2,307,282 in Sindh, 48,165 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and 53,532 votes in Balochistan.
Christians, numbering 2.64 million, make up 1.27 percent of Pakistan’s 207.68 million population and most of them (1.88 percent) reside in the most populous province of Punjab. Muslims constitute 96.28 percent of the nation’s population.
A study — “Promises to Keep and Miles to Go” — released last week by the Lahore-based Center for Social Justice (CSJ), which works among marginalized people in Pakistan, listed the non-implementation of poll promises by seven leading political parties.
This sheds light on the lackadaisical attitude of political parties towards minorities, the study noted.
Political parties are finding core issues of religious freedom and equality too hard to digest and difficult to put into practice in the wake of rising religious intolerance, the study said.
Conspiracies portraying minorities as Western-backed saboteurs still flourish with distressingly bloody results. Often, political parties exploit such fears in the run-up to the polls.
Some of the pledges like minority representation on the Evacuee Trust Property Board, a statutory minority commission, criminalizing forced conversions, reviewing curriculum, and implementing job quotas are common to all parties from time to time.
“This commonality should have helped parties to make progress on these issues.” But they did not, the study observed.
“There have been repeated calls to restore dual voting rights for minorities”
Minorities complain that non-Muslim lawmakers have proved ineffective and often end up as token representatives who are excluded from the real decision-making process.
Until 1999, non-Muslims had dual voting rights in general elections, which allowed them not only to vote for Muslim candidates in general seats, but also for their own non-Muslim representatives.
Last month, Father Inayat Barnard, chaplain of Caritas Pakistan, distributed pamphlets among Christians in Lahore, the second most populous city in Pakistan after Karachi, seeking restoration of double voting rights.
As part of an awareness campaign, Movement for Identity, there have been repeated calls to restore dual voting rights for minorities for about a decade.
Against the odds, minorities are hoping for a sea change with the new government. Peter Jacob, executive director of CSJ, said that Pakistan’s new government should prioritize building an inclusive and egalitarian democracy.
“The agendas of political parties should manifest the replacement of tokenism with concrete plans for addressing the paradigm of division, discrimination and uneven citizenship on the basis of religion,” he stated.
Manifestos need to be based on concrete analysis of problems, Jacob added.
As political parties are not serious enough when it comes to the welfare of minorities, the country’s founding fathers’ commitment of giving equal rights to all citizens has remained an unattainable goal in culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse Pakistan.
*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.
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