For want of data and security,Sindh looks to register worship places of religious minorities

Karachi
Along with the ongoing drive to collect data from and register seminaries and mosques in the province, the Sindh government has now also started working on registering all worship places of non-Muslims within its administrative limits.
The province’s Minority Affairs Department has recently written to Sindh IGP Ghulam Hyder Jamali, asking him to initiate efforts to this end at the earliest.
The letter, a copy of which is available with The News, cited in reference the minutes of a meeting held on April 7 under the chairmanship of the Sindh chief secretary, wherein a deadline of 60 days had been set for the registration of non-Muslim worship places in the province.
Gyan Chand Israni, provincial minister for minority affairs, said the main purpose of the registration process was security related. “We want to ascertain the exact numbers so that we can work out details for proper security cover at all worship places,” he told The News.

Communities’ concerns
While leaders of non-Muslim communities have largely welcomed the Sindh government’s initiative, certain concerns do still abound, particularly regarding the fact that not all of them were taken into confidence before its launch.
In the April 7 meeting, only Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, a MNA of the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz who also heads the Pakistan Hindu Council, and Bishop Sadiq Daniel, the leader of the Protestant Church in Sindh, were present.
The head of the Pakistan Sikh Council, Sardar Ramesh Singh, lamented the fact that representatives of all faiths were not invited to discuss such an important matter. “It was a not a representative meeting of non-Muslim communities and we demand that the government organise another meeting with representatives of all faiths,” Singh told The News.
Michael Javed, a prominent Christian leader and a former parliamentarian, also held the same view. “The government has been ignoring active leaders of non-Muslim communities; that is the reason why most of our community members are not aware about the government’s registration drive,” he said.
Interviews with leaders of different faiths suggest that administrators of worship places located in rural Sindh have been receiving letters about the drive, but none have been distributed in Karachi yet.
Singh said that local police in different districts of the province had sent letters to administrators of gurdwaras, asking them to contact the office of minority affairs secretary in Karachi.
“It would be difficult for our community leaders to come all the way from Jacobabad, Shikarpur and other northern districts just to submit some documents,” he said, adding that such impractical methods were only approved because all community representatives were not present at the meeting.
Javed confirmed that churches in Karachi were yet to receive any letter from the government. However, he suggested that the government, instead of employing confusing methods, should establish a few focal points in every district where administrators of worship places could submit the relevant documents.
Their concerns hold greater value since a representative body, the Sindh Non-Muslim Welfare Committee, had been set up by the caretaker government in 2013 and used to be in regular contact with the government over such matters. The situation has, however, since changed as Javed and Singh both claimed that current officials of the minority affairs department have sidelined the committee.

No accurate data
Officials in the home and minority affairs departments acknowledged that the Sindh government does not have any accurate data about worship places of non-Muslims in the province.
This lack of data, they maintained, was causing problems in ascertaining aspects such as how many security officials to depute at a particular place of worship.
“As is the case with seminaries and mosques, we do not know the real number of non-Muslim worship places. This registration drive will, hopefully, give us a clearer idea and help us devise better security strategies,” said an official of the Home Department.
The most recent statistics in this regard were in a report that was presented by the Sindh home secretary to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif during his Karachi visit in late March this year.
As per the report, there are six gurdwaras in Sindh but the number is challenged by the Pakistan Sikh Council which maintains that there are 18 gurdwaras in the province, five of which are in Karachi.
Similarly, the report states that there are 200, 116 and 71 churches in Karachi’s East, West and South districts, respectively. These figures too are disputed by Christian leaders.
According to Michael Javed, there are 270 small and large Christian neighbourhoods in Karachi and the total number of churches in the city exceeds 5,000. “In Essa Nagri alone, there are around 62 churches,” said Javed.