Jardanwala Tragedy – Express Urdu

(The author is the founder of an intellectual movement of social awareness and the author of 20 books. He has been engaged in the struggle for a long time to connect Pakistani Christians with the society, to highlight their rights and the role of the Christian community in the construction, development and defense of the country. )

Will Christians always have to go through a river of fire to get the attention of the government, state and intellectual elite? The answer to this question is very difficult, but whenever an incident like the Jardanwala tragedy takes place, there is an emotional response for a few days and then there is silence.

One is reminded of a TV drama in which the sole breadwinner of a very poor family dies of an ailing father. Some days the locals give food. By begging, the mother feeds the four children Rokhi Sukhi. Then the child gets sick. No one lends or even helps with treatment. The child dies. Local people cook and bring good food. A few days pass well. Then, after the same hunger and poverty, another child falls ill after a few days. I saw this scene in my childhood and it is still stuck in my mind. A mother is sitting in bed with a sick child.

The youngest child innocently asks the mother, “Mom, when will this brother die?” The mother scolds, “What is the black-faced one saying?” The child innocently says, “Mom. ! “If my brother dies, we will get good food for four days.” This is the situation of Pakistan’s weaker sections, women, children, minorities in general and especially Christians and oppressed Hindu Dalits. When a Mai Mukhtaran or any Hawazadi is a victim of cruelty or a Rizwana is mentally ill like a poisonous snake, the media makes noise for four days.

Officials of government and state institutions say, “Such heinous acts will not be allowed.” , continues without the permission of the government and state institutions. The media goes silent.

Again and again, the media and government or political and state institutions wake up when some beast brutally kills a Fatima Rani or some Andalib is a victim of someone’s pharaohism, then there is noise for a few days and then there is silence. This is how NGOs try to do state work, which obviously cannot. All but a few quickly turn to expropriation due to the inequitable distribution of resources or in response.

This is the situation of all the weaker sections in this state of ours with a population of 24 crore 14 lakh 90 thousand, but the situation of religious minorities is the worst. Even the media and other sections of the society are less aware of incidents such as forced marriages and forced conversions of the downtrodden sections of the people of Sindh, especially Dalit Hindu girls, as a result of coercion or social pressure. Every few days there is some kind of suicide, which is not noticed except by a few heartbroken Hindu Samaj Sevaks in Thar.

Punjab has the largest Christian population among the minorities. Every day settlements are burnt with the help of sensitive laws. Blood is shed.

Yes, Christians have the privilege of getting national and international media attention, but at the cost of it, they have to burn down villages. Many innocent lives have to be sacrificed. Be it the 1951 incident of seven Christian farm laborers burning in the village of Matta near Lahore, or the 1967 massacre of 14 neighboring villages at the village of Martinpur, or countless similar incidents that have been repeated frequently since then, for example, in 1997. Shanti Nagar, 2005 Sangla Hill, 2006 Lahore, 2008 Karachi, 2009 Gojra, 2011 Gujranullah, 2013 Joseph Colony Lahore, 2014 Multan, 2014 Kasur, 2015 Lahore, 2016 Lahore, 2023 Jardanwala.

As a by-product of such tragedies, there are incidents that are suppressed by the Muslim and conscious Christian religious, political and social citizens of the region. No person in the world can understand the condition of the country’s minorities after such incidents without being a Christian citizen of Pakistan. The after effects of such tragedies on the collective psyche of Christians are indescribable and leave millions of citizens of the country suffering from the disease of social alienation.

This point is very important that this is also a human tragedy. It is not only the Pakistani citizens who have the proud Christian identity of the present-day proud Christian identity of the inhabitants of the Indus Valley, who have been fighting caste, discrimination, social attitudes for thousands of years, these women, children and Above all, there are also human beings.

These are the Pakistani citizens who, on August 14th, September 6th, and March 23rd, in Pakistan, in the opinion of some, to show off to the world, are happy to raise the green and white crescent flag, but also in Pakistani embassies around the world without any social pressure. They gather and pray for the stability of this state established on the land of their ancestors. A state of great strategic importance, rich in natural resources, is today in intellectual, social and economic chaos due to other such tragedies, if only our intellectual, state, political and religious elites react to such tragedies after the tragedies of the minorities. Such tragedies can be avoided if one tries to deal with it in advance instead of giving.

For example, take the intellectual elite media, just as reporters have beats in newspapers, surely there will be in channels too, add minority beats and on daily issues, they are mainstreamed print and based on the minority population. If given space and time on electronic media, the sense of the presence of minorities in Pakistani society will be highlighted and it will be known that the ancestors of these five percent people have been living here for thousands of years and the historical structure of this society is such that it A mono-religious society has never been and will never be, because neither all of them can migrate nor will all of them convert. However, in such an effort, this society will crumble and go towards annihilation.

In this manner, if there is a continuous dialogue on the very sensitive issues faced by the backward Hindus of Sindh through a long-term purposeful planning, other citizens will also know about the sufferings of these earth dwellers who are crushed in the mill of poverty, ignorance and oppression. its okay. Then, thanks to the media, the attention of the state and government elites will inevitably be in this direction.

Similarly, there is a great difference between the nuances of Christian society and the nature of the problems faced within Pakistani society, which requires detailed and sustained dialogue, chief among which is the use of sensitive laws as a weapon against them, the electorate system/people over electoral system. Naas on one side and the Christian followers of the political elite on the other side (in this case the problem of all minorities is one).

The strong reservations of Christians on statistics of the Ministry of Statistics and the Election Commission, which are also based on facts, lead to further misunderstandings. For example, according to the statistics of the Ministry of Statistics, the population of Christians was 432,706 in the 1951 census, which increased by 35 percent to 583,884 in 1961. In 1971, this number increased by 55 percent to 907,861. In the 1981 census, this number increased by 44 percent to 1,310,426. . In the 1998 census, this number increased by 60 percent to 2,092,902.

According to this calculation, the Christian population continued to grow by an average of 48.5 percent in 47 years. According to this calculation, if there was a census in 2008, this population would be 3107959. The population should have been 4,615,319 in 2018, but the most controversial census in Pakistani history, which took place 19 years later in 2017 instead of 2008 and then 2018, showed the number of Christians at 2,642,048. My calculations may be wrong, but the Christian population increased from 2092902 in 1998 to 2642048 in 17 years, while the Hindu population increased from 2443614 to 4444870 in 1998.

In 2017, the Minister of Statistics was a Christian and the Chairman or member of the National Assembly Standing Committee on Statistics was a Hindu-Pakistani. On this issue, the issue of electoral system and other social and political issues, I attracted every member of the government elite club, but instead of discussing all kinds of elite pre-issues, special days for minorities in Pakistan like Christmas, Easter, Diwali is used to congratulate Holi or wait for tragedies.

When an event happens, then everyone jumps first while reciting the Mantra of Me. The signs of the recent Jardanwala tragedy were visible from the morning of August 16 and Christians were voicing fears of severe damage on social media, but the post-tragedy time set by media people for minorities has not yet happened. Therefore, there was no question of giving advance warning to the state.

Similarly, the most sensitive issues of the Hindu society, including the conversion of young girls to religion, the difference between the two groups on Hindu caste and scheduled caste in the population statistics of Hindus and the state and government data on the difference between the two groups, the representation in the Houses. His strong reservations on the procedure, marriage registration and other such pressing issues. Unless all these issues are highlighted through the media, how will the roaches crawl on the ears of the state or government.

Finally, it is a request to all the major stakeholders i.e. the three pillars of this state, the legislature, the judicial administration and the fourth pillar media, that if one thinks that in our society, thanks to the hot front of the Cold War, a superpower and 60 per cent of its The effects of the crops sown by all kinds of investment, organized under the auspices of the world-wide alliances, can be removed from this earth by the efforts of a few NGO employees, the English press or some scholars and poor priests. There can be no greater intellectual fallacy.

It will require a cohesive, dynamic, active society in the right direction with organized state and political commitment and positive attitudes that are invisible. The first-mentioned stakeholders should also keep in mind that such tragedies, which push generations of Christians into generational trauma, also have a very negative impact on national security. The reaction of the Pakistani state, government and society has been very positive after this tragedy, but the steps required as a nation to avoid such tragedies in the future need to be taken very seriously and seriously.