Abdul Akbar Chitrali, the lawmaker who drafted and proposed the amendments, after presenting said: “May this bill be a cause of our salvation and may Allah grant our rulers the ability to implement the bill in letter and spirit.”
In the recent past, the blasphemy laws have often been used as a convenient tool to target religious minorities and justify mob violence. These laws are deployed to intimidate and suppress these vulnerable minorities further. According to the available records and data, Pakistani citizens, mostly belonging to the Christian, Hindu, and Ahmadi communities were targeted under the guise of these laws. Most of the time, the complainant misused the laws to obtain personal, social, or economic benefits from the accused and trapped them through false blasphemy accusations.
The latest example of such an incident took place in Karachi, where a dutiful and dedicated Christian woman officer was openly threatened with mob violence for dispensing her duties diligently at the airport. The accuser was trespassing without permission, upon being stopped by the female officer, he started misbehaving and threatened her to comply with his demand or face accusations of blasphemy. This is just one recorded instance; there are dozens of such incidents that happen every month in different parts of the country that remain out of notice of the mainstream media.
Irrespective of whether the allegations are true or false or whether there is a proper procedure for investigating the allegations according to the law, it has been frequently seen that every time a mob gathers, it resorts to violence. A thorough attempt is made to end the life of the accused and to damage the private property and the community the person belongs to.
This is not only a vigilante act of taking the law in their own hands, but also as an act of acting as the plaintiff as well as the judge. Such incidents of mob violence have targeted dozens of people so far. By now, even a few foreign citizens have become direct victims. The recent instance of the killing of a Sri Lankan citizen in Sialkot on false charges of blasphemy is proof of the growing trend of mob violence in Pakistan.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) publishes an annual report recording the situation of human rights in Pakistan throughout the year. According to the report published in 2020, in the thirty years from 1990 to 2019, at least 60 people were killed in extrajudicial cases of mob violence in cases or accusations related to blasphemy charges. Along with members of religious minorities, Muslim citizens also fall prey to this mob justice.
However, subsequent judicial or government investigations have proven that most of the allegations were leveled baselessly or fabricated under the guise of personal grudges. The report published in 2021 recorded 586 cases registered in Pakistan under the blasphemy laws, with the province of Punjab leading the list with 426 cases.
Pakistani and international human rights activists have explicitly expressed their deep concerns about this new penal amendment and reservations are high that if this new amendment becomes part of the law, there is a fear of a new surge of religious extremism and mistreatment of religious minorities and smaller sects of Islam in Pakistan. Social hatred and violence will further intensify and create a religiopolitical divide in society.
The already existing blasphemy laws have for decades enabled legal discrimination, violence, and persecution in the name of religion and encouraged those who seek to misuse them to settle personal scores through instrumentalizing religious sentiments, which has contributed to a palpable sense of uncertainty and insecurity among religious minorities.
The need of the hour is, first and foremost to ensure transparent and credible investigations of the accusations made under these laws.
Additionally, instead of making more stringent amendments to the blasphemy or religious discriminatory laws, there should be a rigorous legal mechanism created, so that if blasphemy accusations are proven false, the accusers should face the strictest punishment and fines under the law.
These measures will discourage the misuse of the blasphemy law as a whole and will hopefully restore the confidence of marginalized religious minorities.
Furthermore, Parliament should enact solid and coherent legislation for the protection of the life and property of religious minorities and introduce more affirmative measures to improve their trust and confidence in the state of Pakistan.