Global attention to the slow ethnic cleansing missing

The recent brutal murder of two Sikh traders by Islamic State terrorists at Peshawar in the restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province marks another low in the unrelenting saga of ethnic cleansing of minorities in Pakistan. The joining of the locals in the protests by the enraged Sikhs demanding protection for the beleaguered non-Muslims is a heartwarming development. However, the sad truth is that be it in Pakistan or the adjoining Afghanistan, the oppressed Sikh community has had little support from the international community. Their slow decimation in their home countries over the past seven decades has not attracted enough deterring attention of the UN, Amnesty International or other human rights watchdogs which are quick to condemn communal strife elsewhere.

This apparent lack of global support has only emboldened successive regimes and the xenophobic majoritarian society to give their tacit approval to discriminatory tactics and misuse of the stringent blasphemy law. Many gurdwaras, churches and temples have been destroyed. Young Sikh girls are routinely abducted and forced to convert and marry Muslim boys. Sikh men are killed with impunity. Pakistan’s first Sikh policeman Gulab Singh Shaheen has been missing under mysterious circumstances for nearly a month now. A Sikh Member of the Provincial Assembly of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Soran Singh, was shot in 2016. Aasiya Bibi, a Christian in Pakistan who was on death row for blasphemy, could fly safely to Canada after her conviction by the apex court only because her case got global media limelight.

The targeted killings of Pakistan’s minority communities – Sikhs, Shias, Hindus, Ahmadiyyas, Christians and Parsis — have meant that either large sections of them have converted to Islam or sought asylum and left the country. Today, they have dwindled to just 3-4 per cent of the population, down from 23 per cent in 1947. The Sikhs’ rights must be protected in the two countries that have been a proud home to them since the time of Guru Nanak’s western sojourns, marked by His teachings of communal harmony.

(Tribune, India)