Uniting Pakistan’s minority and majority
By Mohsin Hamid, Express Tribune, March 3, 2011
There’s a nurse I know in Lahore. She’s tall and stocky, middle-aged. She is on call 24 hours a day and works six days a week. She’s also a freelance headhunter, placing cooks and drivers and maids. She sleeps little. She has five children she hopes to give better lives. Last year, she donated time and money to flood victims.
She is a Pakistani Christian. And on Wednesday, I saw her weep.
She was staring at a TV set. It was reporting the assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s federal minister for minorities, a Roman Catholic. “What’s going to happen to Christians in this country?” she asked me.
I had no answer. But her question is searingly important. A country should be judged by how it treats its minorities. To the extent it protects them, it stands for the ennobling values of empathy and compassion, for justice rooted, not in might, but in human equality, and for civilisation instead of savagery.
Pakistan ought to be exemplary in this regard. After all, ours is a nation of minorities: A patchwork of cultures, ethnicities, languages and sects. Since independence, we’ve tried to use Islam to bind us together, to undo our inherent and pervasive minority-ness. After the country split in 1971, these appeals to religion expanded under ZA Bhutto and reached previously unimaginable extents under Ziaul Haq. They have continued to intensify ever since.
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Related:
Shahbaz Bhatti funeral tinged with anger - Guardian
Profile: Shahbaz Bhatti - Dawn
Shahbaz Bhatti: Pakistani Minister Assassinated - Daily Beast
Who Killed Shabaz Bhatti - Farrukh Saleem, The News
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