France - Pakistan relations have reached a new low. For a westerner, this development appears as Pakistan's self-inflicted wound, but the Pakistan government attributes it to the Islamophobia of France.
For Islamabad, the French law, drafted in the wake of beheading of a teacher by an Islamic radical, is no more than an assault on Muslims. The teacher had earned the wrath of Islamists after displaying some cartoons of the Prophet.
Pakistan President Arif Alvi and Prime Minister Imran Khan have voiced strong opposition to the French law and demanded its roll back. Alvi told a news conference in Islamabad that cracking down on radical Islam stigmatized the Muslim community. He said insulting the Prophet meant insulting all the Muslims. And he asked France not to "isolate" the Muslim minority.
Pakistan has witnessed "protest" rallies across the country, as the clergy declared the re-publication of Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Prophet Muhammed as acts of blasphemy. The protesters had burnt the French flag and declared that they were willing to avenge blasphemy against the Prophet. "Don't make laws that create disharmony among the people," Alvi told his French counterpart, Macron, prompting a strong protest from Paris.
The Alvi-speak ignores what the French leadership is saying; namely, that the Islamists in France are undermining the country's commitment to secularism and that they are spreading radical Islam. Also, the fact that France has become a hub of terrorists of Islamist hues, and that Islamists have killed as many as 250 French nationals. The controversial legislation empowers the Macron government to put people in prison who propagate separatism, threaten officials, and refuse to obey French laws.
While demanding right of equality before law for the Islamic minorities in France and elsewhere, Pakistan does quite the opposite at home. Under its blasphemy law, the accused, not the complainant, must prove his/her innocence. Any person can register a complaint even though he/she is not a witness to the alleged crime of showing disrespect to Islam and its religious texts.
Minority Hindus and Christians are persecuted and their places of worship are either attacked or desecrated. Their lands are grabbed by land sharks with political patronage. Pakistan doesn't spare Shias and Ahmadis though they are Muslims by faith. In fact, the law bars the Ahmadis from identifying themselves as Muslims. This law was brought on the statute book not by a military ruler, but by a charismatic civilian Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was educated in the West.
On March 29, for instance, a 100-year-old Hindu temple was attacked in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, which is also the headquarters of Pakistan's powerful army. A report in the local daily, Dawn, attributed the attack to "the removal of encroachments around the temple on March 24", and to "renovation work."
About 10 to 15 people stormed the temple at about 7.30 pm and damaged the main door and another door at the upper story as well as the staircase, the daily reported but was short on details such as, for instance, whether police were on duty.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, HRCP, has recorded several such instances of rights violations. Hindus were 12.9 percent of the total population when Pakistan was carved out of British India in 1947. Now they account for around 1.5 percent.
Local media reports say that about 1000 Hindu girls are kidnapped each year and are forcibly converted to Islam. Such acts are documented; but the political leadership is unmoved though its voice becomes strident by what is happening in distant France.
The short point is that Pakistan, instead of holding forth on what is good for Muslims in France or any other western country, will do well first to clean its stables. Because it must become a role model on religious tolerance if it wants speak against Islamophobia. And it must make a beginning by revisiting its very own blasphemy laws, which are, as already pointed out, tailor-made to target the minority communities.
Insofar as France-Pak relations are concerned, it is in Islamabad's interest to restore diplomatic ties with Paris to the envoy level. As of now, Pakistan does not have an ambassador in the French capital; the embassy is headed by a charge-de-affair.
While putting its house in order, the Imran Khan government will do well to heed the advice of Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which has kept Pakistan on its Grey List till June this year. It was in 2018 that the FATF outlined a 27-point plan for Pakistan to emerge out of global financial-pariah status it has been pushed into by the Army pump-primed non-state actors.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
