57bearing the cross · reportageFEBRUARY 2018liser and water are some of the reasons
for this. Even if they lease out the land
to someone, it fetches 20,000 Pakistani
rupees per acre over six months. Since
there has been no development here in
the last few decades, there are no jobs
for young people, he explained. “Most
girls from our village go into nurs-
ing,” Dar said. “Many of them get into
good nursing colleges in the Punjab,
but those who go to Sindh usually end
up marrying Muslims, abandoning
the village and tainting their families’
honour.”
The poorer families of the village
look up to the lamberdar for sustenanceand to find suitable buyers for their
land. “It is unfortunate that the church
of Pakistan couldn’t play a charitable
role here the way foreign CMS mission-
aries would,” he said.
The CMS Church used to take care
of widows and provide scholarships to
bright students who wanted to study
further in Faisalabad. Now being tend-
ed to by Pakistani clergy, the church
seems to have acquired new priorities.
Instead of community work, the church
has been spending on the construction
of a new building for the past six years.
“We have spent upwards of 250 million
rupees on the building in the last six
years,” a priest from the church told
me. “The funds came from residents of
Montgomerywala now settled abroad,
and the local parish.”
Although his Assemblies of God
church attracts a sizeable congrega-
tion in a solid construction spread
over a quarter of an acre, “their loyal-
ties still lie with the CMS church,”
Sarfaraz complained. This is a pattern
observable across the colonies settled
by the missionaries, he added. Even if
they prefer a different denomination’s
prayer services, parish members have
an unswerving allegiance towards the
founding church. They present to it
their tithes, ask its priests to preside
over local courts and give it generous
offerings. As a result, in Montgom-erywala, villagers continue to pour in
money towards the church building,
even as their neighbours approach
starvation.
That there is a lack of community-
building is clear. The people vote for
whoever the priest tells them to vote
for, no questions asked, Sarfaraz said.
“The result is before you—a once-meta-
phoric citadel of Christians in Pakistan,
slowly crumbling away and being taken
over by Muslims, while the founding
church asks for additional funds to
raise its already eight-foot boundary
wall.”at around 11.30 am on 28 July last year,
a dozen or so young men were gathered
at a small general store at the entrance
of Youhanabad, Lahore, right next to
the office of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s
union council chairman. There was a
kind of feral excitement in the air as
they urged the elderly shopkeeper to
turn up the volume of a small ancient
television at the shop. One man turned
to another standing next to him and
asked if his brother had picked up
mithai from a sweets shop a few blocks
away. “He’s there right now,” was the
response. “We are waiting for the
verdict.”
As news of the then prime minister
Nawaz Sharif’s conviction for corrup-
tion and subsequent disqualification
from the prime minister post under
Article 62(f ) of the Constitution of
Pakistan flashed across the screen, a
unanimous roar rose among those who
were watching. The crowd grew big-
ger by the minute, gathering vendors
who left their fruit carts unattended,
shoeshine boys clutching their tools
and polish bags and women who had
been walking down the street holding
each others’ hands. “Today is a happy
day for the Christians of Youhanabad,”
the elderly Muslim shopkeeper said in
a quiet tone. “Of course, I am ecstatic
because Imran Khan was right ... the
corrupt ganjas”—“baldies,” as the Sha-
rif brothers are sometimes referred
to—“are out!”
The reaction to the news was telling,
since Youhanabad is the constituency
of the Punjab chief minister, Shahbaz
Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League
(Nawaz), or PML(N), which won theIn the absence of an
independent political
leadership, the fate of
Pakistan’s religious
minorities has been in
the hands of its two
biggest political parties:
Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan
Muslim League (Nawaz)
and the former cricketer
Imran Khan’s Pakistan
Tehreek-i-Insaf.ap photo