This article seeks to examine the status of the Christians in the Pakistani Punjab. Christians, according to the 1998 census, constitute 1.59 per cent of the population, making them the second largest religious minority. Pakistan has the 70^th largest Catholic population and 47^th largest Protestant population in the world.

A vast majority of the Christians are the offspring of the lowest strata of population, untouchables pejoratively called churahs. Most of them embraced Christianity in the last quarter of the 19^th century. Denzil Ibbetson calls them "the sweepers and scavengers par excellence of the Punjab".

With religious ideology propounded as the state’s raison detre, the status of the minorities has remained an issue of enormous complexity throughout Pakistan’s 69 years history. Several incidents like Shantinagar, Gojra, Sumbrial, Kasur and Lahore exemplify the exacerbated level of intolerance of the state and society towards the Christians during the last two decades.

Assassinations of Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti lend credence to the rising tide of intolerance against the minorities. These incidents of physical violence are relatively recent but they have a political and historical context, which for its importance forms the theme of today’s column.

One may argue as does Shuan Gregory that the Muslim majority and non-Muslim minorities are two components of Pakistani polity who have different rights as well as obligations (Gregory 8-9). The respective status of the people belonging to the minorities is markedly different from those hailing from the majority. Conversely, the founder of the country Muhammad Ali Jinnah envisaged a Pakistan where no difference in terms of faith would be permissible. His speech on the subject, delivered on the floor of the Constituent Assembly, on 11^th August, 1947 serves as the appropriate entry point into the debate, centering on the state of Christians in the West Punjab.

The strongest testimony to the plurality, envisaged as the essence to the Pakistani polity, is the initial policy statement of the first Governor General of Pakistan, issued at the floor of the Constituent Assembly on 11^th August 1947. Jinnah pronounced in his historic speech that "in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State".

Iftikhar Malik considers it "the charter of Pakistan and summation of Jinnah’s views on the role of religion and the state. Many of his colleagues shared his vision, unlike several Muslim religio-political parties in India who felt that the idea of Pakistan was an anathema because secular and ‘Westernized’ Muslims were fielding it".

Despite some detractors, Jinnah won many admirers because of his pluralist vision.

The first trace of the Punjab’s Christians espousing the All India Muslim League in its political struggle was in 1928 when Christian leader L. Ellia Ram boycotted the All Parties Conference called by Moti Lal Nehru as did the League. However, the Lahore Resolution in March 1940 became a benchmark in the cordiality that the Christians extended towards the Muslim League.

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According to Chaudhry Chandu Lal, thousands of Christians participated in the Muslim League’s annual meeting. Unlike their co-religionists in Bombay, Goa and Madras, the Christians of the Punjab lent unequivocal support to the cause of the Muslim League. Important among such Christian leaders were S.P. Singha (1893-1949), C.E.Gibbon, R.A.Gomes, S.S. Albert, Fazal Ilahi, Alfred Prashad, F.E. Chaudhry and Raj Kumari Amrit Kaur.

Diwan S.P. Singha, in order to protect the identity, interests and overall existence of the Christians, founded the Indian Christian Association in 1942. The Muslim League, in a bid to attain an independent state, negotiated a better deal with Christians by offering them more concessions than the Congress. Thus, they decided to throw their lot in favour of the League.

In the elections of 1945-46, three Christians were elected to the Punjab Legislative Assembly who subsequently voted for Pakistan. Father J. Saldanha considered that contribution if not ‘decisive’ at least ‘a small sincere contribution’ on the part of the Christians. Their leaders recorded their statements before the Punjab Boundary Commission, comprising Justice Din Muhammad, Zafarullah Khan and Sardar Baldev Singh, and requested that "the Christian population may be counted as part of Pakistan".

Just after partition, on August 17, 1947, a church in Karachi held a large thanksgiving service for the creation of Pakistan.

Read also: An alternative  history -- III

During the initial years, Pakistan faced severe dislocation arising from partition. 7.5 million refugees moved to Pakistan. Majority of them were consigned to refugee camps in Lahore and other transit points where food was scarce and shelter inadequate. Moonsoon had also set in, giving rise to epidemic of the worst kind. Many contracted cholera. In such dire circumstances, Christians came to their help. "In 1947, about 70 to 75% of the paramedical staff in the hospitals was Christians". They looked after the ailing and injured refugees. Victor Azriah says while underscoring the contribution of the Christians in helping out migrants, "Its classical example stays alive in our history when the Hostel of F.C. College, which was closed at that time, had been converted into full fledge hospital known as United Christian Hospital". Furthermore, the Christian educational institutions provided shelter to many homeless refugees after mass migration of 1947.

Despite Jinnah’s emphasis on the pluralist vision for Pakistan, his successors remained impervious to what he had envisaged and fell under the overriding influence of puritanical clergy. The Objectives Resolution was introduced on March 7, 1949, and quite hurriedly passed in just five days on the 12^th of the same month. That resolution marked a pronounced divergence from Jinnah’s vision for a Muslim state. It resolved to observe "the principles of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance, and social justice as enunciated by Islam". Such clauses of the Resolution had an exclusionary overtone for the minorities.

In an interview to Patrick Sookhdeo, Dr Michael Nazir Ali, Bishop of Rochester, declared the Objectives Resolution as a ‘Trojan Horse’, in that the legislators at the time did not realise the implications. Similarly Joshua Fazl-ud-Din apprehended that without constitutional protection, that phrase could be used to consign the non-Muslims to dhimmi status.

The reservations of the minority members failed to budge the majority representatives from their hardened stance on the Resolution. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and some of his colleagues opposed the motion of the minority members for certain amendments. It was put to vote the same day and defeated. Mian Iftikhar ud Din was the only exception. He abstained from voting.

One ominous outcome of the voting on Objective Resolution was the sharp divide between religious majority and minority, which proved detrimental for the Pakistani polity.

To be concluded