FEBRUARY 2018 51reportagethe rides at lahore’s famous Gulshan-e-Iqbal
Park open for business at around 5 pm. Hundreds
of people mill around the sprawling 66-acre park
all day, and the most enthusiastic of them—the
children—wait for ride operators to take up their
positions in small cabins, from where they run a
giant Ferris wheel, merry-go-rounds and fancy
swirling teacups. The park is open to people from
all backgrounds, but on Easter Sunday of 2016, a
particularly large number of the park’s estimated
30,000 visitors were Christians.
At around 6.25 pm, most of the visitors were
packed into the fairground area near Gate 5,
where dozens of children had queued in front of
two popular rides. Just then, between the two
rides and Gate 5, a suicide bomber detonated ten
kilograms of explosives packed inside his vest. The
blast killed at least 72 people, and although the
attackers had announced that they were targeting
the Christians celebrating Easter, most of the vic-
tims were Muslim.
The attack was claimed by Jamaat-ul-Ahrar,
a splinter group of the militant organisation
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar had
also claimed the twin suicide bombings at church-
es in Lahore’s Youhanabad area the year before,
which had killed over 20 people and sparked a
violent protest in the locality that left two Muslim
men dead. But there was no protest this time.
Instead, on the day of the blast, protests were
being held in a different city for very different
reasons. As ambulances raced, sirens scream-
ing, through Lahore’s streets, trying to get the
hundreds of injured to hospitals, around 20,000
agitators gathered in Islamabad and created a trail
of destruction as they marched on the parliament
with the express intent of burning it down. The
demonstration marked the end of the mourning
period for Mumtaz Qadri, who had been hanged
for murdering Salman Taseer, a governor of Paki-
stan’s state of Punjab who had criticised the coun-
try’s blasphemy laws. They pitched camps and
presented their list of demands, including the ex-
ecution of Asia Bibi—a Christian woman accused
of blasphemy, whom Taseer was killed for defend-
ing. The protesters torched a metro bus, ransacked
a metro bus station, destroyed private vehicles
parked on roads, breached the high-security Red
Zone and surrounded the parliament before the
army was called in.
Reeling from the attack on the park in Lahore,
the Christian leadership’s only condemnations and
consolations came mostly through either the gov-
ernment-approved channel of the Pakistan Ulema
Council or through Facebook videos. I spoke to
several of Lahore’s church leaders, who explained
that they did not want to present themselves as
potential targets anymore. They had strict di-
rections from the government not to protest or
hold public shows of grief or memorials for those
deceased. “We were told that we would lose any
guarantee of security from the state if we did,” one
of the bishops told me.for decades, the Christian minority of Pakistan
has lived a marginalised existence. According to
the theologian Duncan B Forrester’s book For-
rester on Christian Ethics and Practical Theol-
ogy, most Christians in Pakistan were formerly
members of disadvantaged Hindu castes, and were
converted by missionaries of the Catholic Church
and the Church Mission Society. Today, many of
them live in Christian-only villages and slums
around Pakistan’s big cities, and hold jobs such
as those of tenant farmers, sanitary workers and
factory workers.
Over the last few years, the community has
faced extreme violence at the hands of Islamic
militants. A year before the attack on Gulshan-e-
Iqbal Park, two blasts in Lahore churches killed
at least 17 people. Before that, in September 2013,
twin suicide bombers killed 127 people and injured
more than 250 others when they attacked a church
in Peshawar.
But sporadic violence is only one among a
multitude of problems faced by the country’s
Christians. They live in a religiously hostile envi-
ronment, where intolerance is not harboured by
extremists alone.
The hostility has official licence in various
regressive laws and policies. Article 19 of the
country’s constitution restricts freedom of speech
“in the interest of glory of Islam,” among other
things. According to Article 20, freedom and prac-
tice of religion is “subject to law, public order and
morality”—a provision that has been selectively
used to oppress minorities. The country has laws
against blasphemy, which have been used to pros-
ecute hundreds of Christians. The laws are heavily
weighed against minorities, and deem desecration
of the Quran or any irreverence towards Muham-
mad punishable by death. As documented in the
book Non-Muslims in Muslim Majority Societies,
by the academics Kajsa Ahlstrand and Goran Gun-
nar, while the law does not require candidates
for the posts of prime minister and chief justice
of Pakistan to be Muslims, the oaths for the posts
do—they require them to “swear solemnly that I
am a Muslim and believe in the Unity and Oneness
of Almighty Allah.” The absence of protections for
Christians has allowed the widespread expression
of communal hatred—across the country, mob vio-
lence and lynchings over allegations of blasphemy
are commonplace.
Despite the extent of this persecution, or per-
haps because of it, Pakistan’s Christian commu-opposite page:
A Christian woman
shows a journalist
a charred Bible
outside her torched
house in the
town of Gojra in
Pakistan’s Punjab
province. Her home
had been attacked
during the 2009
mob violence in the
area, in which eight
Christians were
killed.