58 THE CARAVANbearing the cross · reportageprovincial election with a landslide majority from
this area only four years ago. But since 2015, when
two churches of the area were attacked, Imran
Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf seems to be gain-
ing an upper hand.
In the absence of an independent political lead-
ership, 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, or PTI. Amid political
one-upmanship, Christians continue to face vio-
lence and state repression, while their issues and
concerns go unaddressed. Youhanabad—one of the
most densely populated neighbourhoods of Lahore
and the largest Christian settlement in Pakistan—
is one such site of political wrangling.
Most of the residents of Youhanabad trace their
lineage from saipis, or peasants, who worked on
lands owned by Hindus and Sikhs. After Parti-
tion, Muslim migrants were allotted those lands,
and did not allow the saipis to continue working
on the lands. The displaced peasants moved to
the cities where they became part of the urban
poor and squatted in the peripheries. The neigh-
bourhood was built and planned by the Catholic
Church in 1961 for these internally displaced
peasants. The church not only bought the 40
hectares on which the colony was to be built, but
also planned for it to have wide roads and all pos-
sible amenities. Today, however, Youhanabad is
poverty-stricken and people lack access to basic
facilities.
On 15 March 2015, two bombs ripped through
two of the largest churches in the neighbour-
hood—Christ Church and St John’s Roman Catho-
lic Church—while Sunday services were under-
way, killing over 17 people and leaving over 100
injured. What made headlines, however, was the
aftermath of the twin suicide bombings, in which
two Muslim men, taken into custody within hours
of the blast by the Elite Force—a unit specialis-
ing in counterterrorism operations—were pulled
out of a security vehicle and brutally lynched by
a mob, which then proceeded towards the metro
bus station right in front of the entrance to You-
hanabad and vandalised it. Since then, any con-
demnations of the bomb attack—from members of
any community—are usually preceded or followed
by a display of horror at how the people of You-
hanabad reacted to them.
The government and the media, too, focussed
on the violent reaction to the blasts. The day after
the bombings, the interior minister described the
vandalism of the metro bus station as “the worst
kind of terrorism.” Photojournalists and television
crews sent to capture images of the attack fo-
cussed instead on the lynchings, beaming horrificimages of mangled body parts and burned bones
across the country. What followed was perhaps
the largest witch-hunt the city has experienced in
the last four years.
Law enforcement agencies were given permis-
sion to force entry into homes at any time of the
day and pick up everyone they could identify from
the photographs and videos shot by media per-
sons. “They went beyond that,” an elderly Muslim
shopkeeper from the area told me. “I mean, you
can’t memorise facial features of hundreds of peo-
ple, so the police went around picking up anyone
they thought would be involved in the lynching.
They didn’t bother the Muslim residents though.”
He recalled that in the weeks following the at-
tacks, most families in the area, even those unaf-
fected by the blasts, left their homes.
Within days, the police, egged on by pressure
from political parties and the provincial govern-
ment, picked up over a hundred young men from
Youhanabad and put them behind bars. The Ex-
press Tribune newspaper reported that the police
had detained 17 relatives and neighbours of nine
suspects identified in the footage and pictures
available in the media. They were released with
the help of political figures from the neighbour-
hood.
Ishtiaq Gill and his brother Tariq Javed were
among those political figures. Javed was the first
Christian chairman of a union council in the area,
a post equivalent to a mayor, and had won a pro-
vincial election years earlier. Ishtiaq also became
the chairman of a union council, after running as
an independent candidate in the local government
election held the following year. Both of them have
connections with the ruling PML(N).
“The way police went about picking up boys and
relatives of suspects was reflective of how Chris-
tians are treated in our society,” Ishtiaq told me in
June. “These are a people who had just lost family
members or were taking care of relatives injured
in the blasts. Dozens of wailing mothers and fa-
thers would visit our office begging us to help
them get their sons released.”
It was important for the brothers to use their
clout in the PML(N) to get these men released,
because many people in the area suspected that
Javed was hand-in-glove with the police.
The two brothers have cordial relations with the
chief minister, who had appointed Javed’s wife,
Shazia Tariq, as a member of the provincial as-
sembly of the region on a reserved seat for women.
“We would visit the police station and present
assurances to get these boys released,” Ishtiaq
said. “We got dozens of them released till Joseph
Francis, who runs a legal-aid NGO, filed a petition
in court demanding to know what had become of
the men detained by the police.” Ironically, hisopposite page:
The casket of a
victim of the 2015
church bombing in
Lahore being carried
to an ambulance.