churches in Lahore acted bravely and prevented more casualties.
“We demand that the government should issue us licensed weapons and train our community volunteers so that we can save our worship places on our own,” he added.
Chouhan said he would train the volunteers to detect guns and bombs, identify suspicious people and spot unclaimed bags and other potentially dangerous objects.
A tried and tested approach
Security researchers and religious leaders said a community using their own security volunteers for protecting their worship places was not a new concept.
Initially, the Ahmadiyya community had started relying on its own security to protect its worship places.
Over the past five years or so, even the Shia community has formed its own security squads.
“We see a more thorough approach to this volunteer security networks among these communities because of the attacks on them,” Rabia Mehmood, an Islamabad-based researcher told The News.
And the government encourages this trend. “Policemen deputed outside worship places don’t have any knowledge about the communities and it is difficult for them to verify who is an outsider,” said a senior police officer in Korangi requesting anonymity.
“We also ask the religious communities to depute some of their community members who can help us verify people.”
Minority leaders also complain that the Sindh government had failed to adhere to the five percent job quote for non-Muslims in the police department.
“Policemen from the same community can perform a good job in safeguarding the worship places of their faith, but sadly, the policy of five percent quota has not been implemented in the past four years,” said Sanjesh S Dhanja, the president of Pakistan Hindu Seva, a non-governmental organisation.
A report submitted by the Sindh government to the Supreme Court in January this year also corroborated this fact. However, the provincial government defended itself saying that non-Muslim communities were not interested in police jobs.
Mehmood said volunteer security was now a standard practice at the congregations of religious minorities because of the lack of trust the communities had in the State security apparatus.