The residents of the federal capital, particularly representatives of different faiths and minorities are feeling insecure and unprotected at the emboldened stance and threatening tone of the religious outfit Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan’s (TLP) leaders.
While addressing the protesters a day earlier, leader of the TLP Saad Hussain Rizvi and his companions had made it clear they would reach Faizabad come what may and lead their “Palestine Solidarity” march to the doors of the Embassy of the United States.
The current protest march has refreshed the bitter memories of the 2017 Faizabad Sit-In where the TLP workers remained camped demanding resignation of the Law Minister in former Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi’s cabinet over a controversial bill.
Later, on October 31, 2018 Supreme Court absolved a Pakistani Christian woman Asia Bibi of blasphemy charges. A large number of the TLP’s workers took to roads against the decision and blocked roads countrywide.
The TLP’s protest and sit-in prompted the Christian, Hindu, Ahmedi and other non-Muslim communities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad to keep low profile and in some cases go underground. “I can still remember I had applied leave from my office after the TLP’s protests in 2018,” said an Ahmadi community member working in education department of Rawalpindi. Those days were like nightmare for us, he said. An Ahmadi doctor living in Islamabad also shared his ordeal when some of the workers of his hospital kept a distance from him and a number of them even refused to work under him as he belonged to a different faith. “After the TLP’s 2017 sit-in I suspended the private practice because one of my colleagues belonging to the same faith received threats from none other than his own patients,” he recalled. The TLP’s proposed march has refreshed those painful memories and we are feeling insecure as the government and the law-enforcement authorities seem helpless before them, said Azad (name changed) a Christian employee of the civic agency Capital Development Authority (CDA). It may be mentioned here that there are hundreds of Christian and Hindu workers and employees working in the civic agency and majority of them are associated with health or municipal administration.
As the TLP’s march is becoming talk of the town, every passing adds to our worries, particularly concerns for our children’s’ security who are studying with their Muslim friends in the capital’s schools, said Saima Margaret (name changed) a nurse at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences. She said although it doesn’t happen often but during the days when such extremists declare march on Islamabad, her children face discrimination by some of their class fellows, even a few teachers tend to humiliate them by asking faith-based questions. I pray the march by religious fanatics never happens in Islamabad or anywhere in the country, said Margaret.
