A bomb blast outside a church in the port city of Karachi earlier this month has again highlighted violent religious persecution in this majority Muslim country.
Pakistan's constitution protects minorities' right to ”profess, practice and propagate” their religion and their right to ”establish, maintain and manage” religious institutions.
Even so, minority groups report a wide range of violations affecting Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis or Zoroastrians, Qadianis or Ahmedis, and Kalash.
Religious minorities form roughly four percent of the population, according to official figures. Christians are the largest and most visible minority. The U.S. State Department highlighted attacks on Pakistani churches in its latest annual report on religious freedom worldwide. It released the document last month.
While violence grabs headlines, neglect and expropriation of religious sites appear to flourish largely unchecked.
In a narrow alley in the heart of the old quarter of this city in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) between Pakistan and Afghanistan, Sikhs gathered recently to celebrate the 338th anniversary of the birth of Guru Gobind Singh, the 10th Sikh Guru..
The temple in which they congregated -- the centuries-old Gurdwara Bhai Jugha Singh -- had remained sealed and in disrepair since Pakistan's independence in 1947 until 1980, when the government handed over the Gurdwara to the Sikh community.
Less than a kilometer away, another Gurdwara lies in virtual ruins. No Sikh has prayed in Gurdwara Biba Singh for the past half-century as the building remains in the custody of the Evacuee Trust Properties Board, a government body of the minorities affairs ministry that is supposed to look after properties abandoned by fleeing Sikhs and Hindus when the Indian sub-continent was partitioned in 1947. The Gurdwara had been used as a vocational school for women until last year, when a portion of its roof caved in. Now the school's former head teacher and her daughter live in the building as the board's tenants.
The Sikh community has asked the authorities repeatedly over the last few decades to turn the temple over to them but to no avail, said community leader Sahib Singh.
”I have appealed to the NWFP governor that the Gurdwara be handed over to us and we will reconstruct it from our own pockets,” said Singh.
Hindus have similar complaints. In Risalpur, a small town about 50 kilometers from here, Shia Muslims illegally took over and occupied a 65-year-old temple, Sanatam Dharam Mandir, in the mid-1980s. The Peshawar branch of the Evacuee Trust Properties Board reported the violation to local authorities in the 1990s but no action appears to have been taken.
The Qadiani, or Ahmedi, community has lost many of its places of worship since then premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto declared its members non-Muslims in 1974 in a bid to appease politically restive religious figures unhappy with the group's proselytizing. Qadianis maintain they remain a Muslim sect.
Qadiani places of worship have been a favoured target of vandals and many Bait-uz Zikar, as their mosques are called, have been expropriated or sealed by zealots from Pakistan's mainstream Muslim sects. Although the violations persist, they peaked during the rule of Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who ousted Bhutto.
”Zia extended all support to the Mullahs who unleashed attacks on our people and Bait-uz Zikar. The authorities, afraid of the reaction, never took the culprits to task,” said Irshad Ahmed Khan, head of the Qadiani community in the NWFP.
In one case, a local member of parliament and his gang seized a Qadiani mosque in the late 1980s. Community representatives said they have filed complaints and appeals at every administrative level to no avail.
Afrasiab Khattak, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and an eminent lawyer, said he believes the government takes complaints of religious persecution lightly. He attributed this to the state's adoption of one religion as official, saying this had the implicit effect of disowning all faiths but Islam.
”The state is responsible for protecting the rights and worship places of the religious minorities. Religious freedom means protection of worship places as well. If the state fails to protect them that is a violation of the concerned constitutional provisions,” he said.
Officials have defended their record, noting that government intervention in a number of cases has saved lives. But many also have acknowledged the government's inability to enforce religious protections against highly motivated and often well-armed extremists.
And while some of those extremists have described their actions as driven by faith, commercial interests also appear to be a factor.
The small Balmik, or low-caste Hindu community in Peshawar's cantonment area, for example, has been resisting military authorities' efforts to evict Hindu and Christian from the compound to make space for a shopping plaza.
Ram Lal, a community leader, said the Balmik have lived in the neighborhood since 1861. However, the community's main concern remains their small temple.
”We will vacate the houses if it serves the national interest of the country but we hate to see the temple bulldozed for constructing a shopping complex,” he said.