61bearing the cross · reportageFEBRUARY 2018rights and minority affairs, and Kam-
ran Michael, the federal minister for
human rights, arrived in front of the
Catholic church, several people in the
street threw shoes at their cars, and
some even stones.
“How dare they show their faces in
our neighbourhood,” thundered an
elderly man who had lost a son in the
attacks. “These sellouts are the enemies
of Christians in Pakistan!”
Michael hails from Bahar Colony in
Kot Lakhpat, ten kilometres south of
Youhanabad and perhaps the second
most populous Christian neighbourhood
in Pakistan. He lives there in a small
gated neighbourhood called Dilkushah
Gardens. His close affiliation with the
PML(N) since 2001 has helped him get
appointed as a member of national and
provincial assemblies and the Senate.
And his politics, some of his neighbours
argue, closely mirror those of Peter
John Sahotra, who was elected to the
National Assembly several times un-
der the separate electorate system and
was also affiliated with the PML(N).
“Well, Sahotra was a puppet of the anti-
Christian Pakistan Muslim League and
an opportunist, who resettled in the UK
when Musharraf came to power,” an
elderly shopkeeper who has a store close
to Dilkushah Gardens told me.
The problem with Kamran Michael
is that he never bothered to organise
along communal lines or address spe-
cific problems that minorities face, the
shopkeeper said. In the local govern-
ment elections held last year, despite
a close competition from independent
candidates in the area, the PML(N)’s
candidate, Chaudhry Yousaf Javed,
won and became the chairman of a un-
ion council. Michael went door-to-door
to campaign for Javed and took vote
pledges from the stage of Anwar Fazal,
a popular evangelist, with a dedicated
parish of thousands of people.Fazal has worked in diverse profes-
sions, including working short stints in
the Pakistani film industry. He became
famous through his religious organisa-
tion Eternal Life Ministries of Pakistan,
or ELM, which promises physical heal-
ing through divine intervention, and
for a television channel named after his
son, Isaac TV.
ELM has come a long way from its
humble beginnings. The entrance to
the street where Fazal’s church and
channel studios are located is blocked
by security barriers, with men dressed
in black and wearing SSG Commando
badges standing guard. Towards one
end of the building is a large table
where people stand in three queues to
hand over envelopes and cash to church
cashiers as tithes and offerings. Every
Wednesday, thousands of people gather
in an open compound adjacent to the
church building for Fazal’s prayer and
worship service, where Michael makes
regular appearances.
In turn, Fazal often accompanies
Michael when he travels abroad to ap-
prise the global community of the state
of minorities at large in Pakistan. The
two, many residents of Bahar Colony
claim, frequently gloss over the plight
of Christians in their country. “Pa-
kistani Christian asylum seekers in
Thailand have told us—and my own
brother-in-law, who was deported from
Thailand, confirmed that Michael and
Fazal gave statements in various meet-
ings with the UNHCR and Thai gov-
ernment that most of the asylum seek-
ers do not have legitimate grounds to
seek asylum,” Zahid Nazir, who runs an
activists’ forum and is a neighbour of
Michael in Dilkushah Gardens, told me.
The last decade has been brutal for
Christians in Pakistan, said the elderly
shopkeeper while listing some major
incidents of violence off the top of his
head. The so-called representatives of
Christians in Pakistan were nowhere
to be seen in the aftermath of those
incidents, he continued. Because those
leaders cannot promise security for
Christians in Pakistan, he added, a
large wave of migration to asylum
camps abroad had occurred in the last
decade or so. “If I had the money or
the means to get out of here, I’d gladly
leave too.” s