Violation of Human Rights in Pakistan

One wonders why the American administration still continues glossing over the much-publicised appeal of several Pakistani minorities leaders to prevail upon Islamabad to honour their rights. It is well documented that ever since the creation of Pakistan, its citizens, and minorities in particular, have been denied their freedoms. The recent reports of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child, the U.S. Commission on international religious Freedom, the Jinnah Institute, the Pakistan Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Justice and Peace confirm that rights violations have increased during the last couple of years in the country. The Supreme Court of Pakistan has also taken cognizance of this sad phenomenon in some of its recent hearings and judgments.

As an important member of the contemporary world and the United Nations, the United States is morally and legally obliged to see to it that Pakistan complies with all established international covenants on rights. Ironically, the United States administration has hardly been serious about it. Of late the administration has urged President Asif Ali Zardari to protect Pakistan’s minorities while it has gone ahead with its uninterrupted economic and military aid to Islamabad.  The American Congress has been no better. Last year Democratic Party Senators Robert Menendez, Ben Cardin and Robert Casey and Republican Senators Mark Kirk, Roy Blunt and Mike Johanns wrote to President Zardari expressing their concern over the arrest of a young Christian girl with Down’s syndrome for allegedly burning pages of Muslim holy books. Their letter urged the government to prevent the abuse of Pakistan’s blasphemy law. It observed ,“blasphemy allegations have resulted in the lengthy detention of, and violence committed against, Christians, Ahmadis, Hindus and other religious minorities as well as members of the Muslim majority community… Hindus are fleeing Pakistan due to growing religious intolerance in the country. Among the acts alleged by Hindus leaving the country are harassment, theft, rape, kidnapping and forced conversion.”  

Such casual approaches of the United States government towards rights violations in Pakistan does not but allow the successive governments in Islamabad to just announce some cosmetic measures and go scot free.  It may be recalled that following reports of insecurity among Hindus and their possible mass exodus from Sindh and Baluchistan last year, President Zardari constituted a three-member committee comprising of senator Hari Ram, member National Assembly Lal Chand and law minister Maula Baksh Chandio to express solidarity with Hindus .While celebrating the Minorities’ Day on August 11, 2012, Zardari said,  "We cannot be oblivious of our responsibility to continue making efforts for bringing into the mainstream of national life peoples of all faiths and allay their concerns about their rights and privileges as guaranteed by our religion and the constitution. ''Later, he also deplored the attack on a church in Mardan in the wake of a controversy over a film on the Prophet and said that… “This act on the places of worship of other religions is un-Islamic and highly condemnable”. But that has been all. Islamabad has done little to improve its rights record. It prefers to pass on the blame to others. In the case of the minorities exodus to India last year, for instance, Pakistan’s then Interior Minister, Rehman Malik alleged that the Indian High Commission in Islamabad was issuing  visas to Hindus in a large number and encouraging them to travel out and that this was being done to malign the reputation of Pakistan. He also referred to a report of Pakistan’s Federal Investigative Agency chief and claimed that the Hindus going to India had intended to visit religious sites and come back.

Besides, the United States government would do well to bear in mind that Pakistan’s rights violations are part of the agenda of the self-styled Islamists spread across the world. If tolerated, it would embolden the Islamists further to execute their agenda out of Pakistan posing a threat also to the values of  the citizens in the entire civilised world and democracies in particular. The United States and the world’s other leading democracies have already suffered a lot on account of the Pakistan supported  radical  Islamism. Most of the terror strikes on the West from Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 eight years before 9/11 to Mir Aimal Kansi who shot dead two CIA agents to Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square “Idiot Bomber”, have had Pakistani Islamists’ fingerprints. Wisdom demands the United States not to let history repeat itself.

Occasionally, one comes across an argument that the United States needs to be soft to Islamabad on the front of rights in order to solicit its support in the on-going war on Islamist terror. Such logic is highly fallacious. History bears out that Pakistan’s successive regimes - military and civilian alike - have all been Islamist-friendly. There is some kind of a symbiotic relationship between its army and clergy to push their fanatic, anti-democratic agenda at home and abroad. Also, some Wahabi-Deobandi Islamist elements have infiltrated courtesy the erstwhile President Zia-ul Haq, the top echelons of Pakistan’s armed forces and intelligence agencies. Such elements are highly unlikely to let the establishment in Islamabad to cooperate, even if it really wanted to, with its counterpart in Washington in the war on terror. This has already been seen in the case of Osama bin Laden. Commonsense has it that it could not have been possible for him to hide in the country for such a long time without the connivance of certain elements within the Pakistani Army. 

 Jagdish N Singh is a senior Indian journalist. Currently, he is a consulting editor to the Power Politics magazine published from New Delhi. Views expressed are personal