Monday, 19 October 2026

Persecution of minorities in Pakistan

The creation of Pakistan was meant to allow the minorities of India (mainly Muslims, but Sikhs and Christians as well), to practice their religion freely, but gradually it has come to mean that the country was created in the name of Islam. I can easily prove that this was not the case, one only has to read the speeches made by the founder (Jinnah) to see that he was strictly secular. For this reason, the non-Muslims of Pakistan are persecuted so much that millions of them have left the country after 1947. Karachi, for instance had many Goan Christians when I was in school, but today one rarely comes across them. Some of them settled in the UK, others are in Canada and the US. 

The problem was that before partition, the British did not trust Muslims (who had been the rulers before they colonized India), so they employed Christians in all government departments. I once asked a retired KPT accountant (a Muslim) how many Muslim officers were employed in the KPT before 1947. His answer shocked me. There were no Muslim officers, there were only three Muslim employees among hundreds, and among these three he was a clerk, the other two were a driver and a watchman. Among the officers were Hindus, Christians, Parsis, and even Sikhs (very few of whom lived in Karachi at the time). Even in the 1970s, when I was working in the petroleum industry, there were many Christians in senior management positions. Perhaps this is one reason why minorities have always been discriminated against by the majority in Pakistan.

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