A meaningful idea was introduced by a minority rights leader at a recent conference on child rights, where he said that the true harmony would have been if the communities were identified by their identities, but that identity gets overshadowed when we use the term “religious minorities.” It also further alienates them from their own identity when we use the term “non-Muslims,” which implicitly means a distinction is being deliberately made on the basis of one being a Muslim or not.
A recent resolution was moved in the Sindh Assembly by Deputy Speaker Anthony Naveed, which has stressed that in order to bring more inclusivity among people the word “Minorities” should be removed. It reminds us of the Quaid’s famous words, “Hindus will cease to be Hindus, and Muslims would cease to be Muslims …” where it was never about the erasure of identities, but about none having an unequal, preferred or disadvantaged position when it comes to the rights and obligations for a citizen.
There are impediments to removing discrimination, and denials of the very basic right to equality. We cannot achieve the goal of all becoming one—where each member of a community feels as an equal worthy citizen—when there is no acknowledgment of the fact that the constitution itself carries within it preferences based on religion, which needs reforms to remove the sense of deprivation. Discrimination is an inevitable consequence, and the void this has created is naturally filled by religious and right-wing clergy, which leads to structural exploitation taking form against the discriminated communities.
The constitution itself carries religious preferences, creating a foundation for discrimination and a sense of deprivation
To be fair, this is happening not so much because of the constitution or the law, as it can be argued that protections and safeguards for the minorities are there, but more so because social behaviors that reinforce discrimination go without repercussions. This can be seen in the form of an unfiltered single narrative discourse that explicitly or subliminally inculcates demeaning conjectures towards the marginalised, or the minorities.
In schools and mass educational institutes, we see a single dominant narrative taking hold with no redress to remove the often pointed-out structural discrimination that lies embedded in the state-promoted curriculum or the corresponding troubling content in textbooks that seem to have been printed in haste. With little in the way of government investments to improve infrastructure or enhance accessibility, an all-out focus and emphasis has instead been laid on defining curriculum standards and contents, or even on ideological entities, such as the National Rahrnatul-Lil-Aalameen Wa Khatamun Nabiyyin Authority with its claim on the education budget as it works under the mandate of the Ministry for Federal Education and Training.
Lessons have taught us time and again how faulty an assumption it is that religion as a singular force can keep a nation together and compliant. Even within one religion, the variations of belief held by different people cannot be singularised. We may not see it upfront, but the content of separate religious textbooks for our religious minorities has carried within them more divisive seeds, as there are many denominations and sects within each religion. There are instances of discontent and amplified intragroup differences on matters of faith that are coming forth. This should be reason enough to question the aim of the state, as has been publicised by the National Curriculum Council, that this will foster interfaith harmony.
The fact is the demand for religious education textbooks has come from religious minority groups because they desired to have an equalising alternative to compulsory Islamiyat or Ethics, which their children were compelled to take for having no other option. The question that needs to be asked here is why the government is so bent on promoting religious education instead of focusing on basic science literacies. But religious identity does matter when religious education is made compulsory from grade 1, instead of compulsory science literacy, which carries no identity restrictions for others to join. This change in the scheme of studies only reflects that the intention is in dividing communities, not binding them, through education.
Mind-setting over a “single nation” through education becomes a most convenient tool for a state aiming to become hard, and the divisiveness that is created as a consequence becomes a reason for placing more justification for its controls. We often see censorship in alternate discourses countering the dominant narratives; we also see freedom of speech getting undermined with political and academic dissent attracting PECA clauses or sometimes even Blasphemy clauses. Not to forget, content review processes also have the criteria set by the Ulema Council Board, as is mandated through Punjab Assembly amendment legislation, to expand on their roles as reviewers.
The fact is: even at the school level, even with stark realities on the ground, nobody is noticing the damage being done to both the mind of a child coming from the majority community and the one coming from a minority.
There were good attempts in the recent past to address issues of discrimination and ostracisation. In 2018, a policy guideline to counter extremism drafted by NACTA (National Counter Terrorism Authority) came forward; however, the document has seen no fruition to this day, and in fact, it has vanished. It was significant as a strategic framework as it brought a very realistic understanding of the causes of discrimination, leading towards extremism by explaining it as “…having absolute belief in one’s truth with an ingrained sense of self righteousness”. This understanding further touched upon the sense of righteousness which enables the “holder of belief to grow judgmental attitude towards other people’s beliefs followed with intolerance” and cautioned on how this “extreme” polarisation is already dividing society into ‘us and them’ behaviors.
In retrospect, this is exactly how the term “non-Muslims” feels to a minority when sensed from a dominant viewpoint. It implies that the community in question is deprived of its own identity as Hindu, Christian, Sikh, Baha’i, Parsi, Ahmadis, and all others, who desire equal acknowledgment, respect, and dignity as citizens. This is, as the now-vanished document rightly coined, a “dismissal of diversity” that continues to prevail.