Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi
In a single day on 16 August 2023, around 19 churches in Jaranwala were ransacked. The mob rampaged through the prominent Christian areas of the city to accomplish its dastardly mission, which had begun on the pretext of defiling of Holy Quran by two Christian brothers.
The vigilante mob had gathered strength from the neighborhood by playing into their religious emotions that demanded that an act of blasphemy be responded to with equal force. According to the report, an announcement was made through a mosque calling upon the faithful to take revenge not from the two brothers who were blamed for desecrating Quran but from their entire community—from its children, its women, and its elders. In no time, the city was engulfed in hatred emanating from a story that had neither been investigated nor reported to the police.
Unfortunately, by the time the police took control of the situation, the damage had been done. If reports from the crime scene are to be believed, the police allowed the game of hate to take place without intervention. Moreover, like always, not until the news broke out on national media did the police gather muscle to make a foray.
Until now, hundreds of miscreants have been hauled up, along with the two brothers blamed for dishonoring Quranic pages.
The Jaranwala incident is part of a series of violent acts perpetrated on minorities in the name of religion. The way the drama unfolded, it is convenient to blame the external forces to have manipulated the event to nudge Pakistan towards a failed state emblem further. I cannot rule out the probability that Pakistan’s foes, both within and without, may have scripted this bloody theatre. However, I cannot also turn my sight away from the failure of Pakistan as a state to prevent such incidents from happening, either.
As part of the Pakistan Ulema Council’s mission to strengthen interfaith harmony in Pakistan, we hurriedly managed to contain the situation from spilling further. We rallied Christian leadership from across Pakistan and jointly condemned the incident.
We resolved not to allow such incidents to sever our relations as one nation—Christians and Muslims. However, this is a patchwork that we, as the propeller of interfaith harmony, have been doing whenever such a situation arises. The real work is to originate from the state.
Only then will we be able to end such incidents? The unforgivable part of this entire story is the ease with which the people’s religious feelings were manipulated, just like it was easy to manipulate their religious sentiments four decades back. We have not progressed in building character in our nation. Would I be wrong to assert that this country is a group of people lacking a common objective that helps in character building?
When the Army Public School incident occurred, the state assigned itself the duty to address not the symptoms—terror-related incidents—but the cause—extremism—in society.
The awakening to this realization was formulated into a National Action Plan. It was a 20-point agenda agreed upon by all the political and religious parties and fringe elements as an appropriate policy response to thrust back the rising tides of terrorism.
Under the plan, a constitutional amendment was made to allow the Pakistan army to trial the terrorists in the military courts with an apparent objective of turning the wheel of justice in the right direction. Many terrorists were hanged to death; terror financing was chocked, proscribed organizations were restricted from raising themselves in new attire; registration and regulation of religious seminaries were carried out with effective results; FATA was merged into KP, the use of social media in terror assistance was stemmed, militancy in Punjab was brought down, Karachi operation was completed successfully with the result that target killing was reduced to zero, sectarian violence had almost diminished, though belatedly NACTA was revived. The dissemination of hate material through newspapers, media, and other sources was controlled, and the media was restricted from giving airtime to terror-related activities. I must say that Pakistan.
Army did a tremendous job assisting the civilian government in lending wings to the NAP. Nevertheless, despite all the successes, our failure to revamp the criminal justice system of Pakistan—one of the 20 points NAP agenda—had rendered weak the entire edifice of the National Action Plan.
The criminal justice system is a formation of multiple pillars, such as academia, law enforcement, forensic services, the judiciary, and corrections. They support the idea of legal justice to protect the citizens’ life and property and ensure the implementation of law and order.
Since the Jaranwala incident, I have repeatedly said that had we tried and given exemplary punishment to the culprits of the Gojra and Joseph colony incident, we might have stopped yet another attack on minorities.
I would urge the government of Pakistan to focus on creating a system whereby people are educated about blasphemy and how it should be approached. Training people on how to react if their religious sentiments are attacked is required. Congregational setups such as Juma prayers and church masses should be used to highlight the importance of interfaith harmony.
The Pakistan Ulema Council has formed a high-level committee of 20 members, which includes senior religious leadership from Christian and Muslim communities. This committee aims to probe the reasons for the Jaranwala incident in light of previous happenings to identify gaps and recommend measures to bridge them. Over the last year, there has been a considerable reduction in incidents related to blasphemy. Therefore, the sudden spike is both worrisome and detrimental to the future.
The sense of community is as important as trust in the justice system of a country for the society to progress. It is time to move on from mere condemnation to address core issues.
