But the creation of Pakistan in 1947 — and its subsequent slide into the exclusionary politics of religion — has proved disastrous for the Christians’ security. Unlike in India, where the pressures of representative government and an ostensibly secular polity have offered some protection to disenfranchised castes, Pakistan’s undemocratic state has never accepted caste as a legitimate political category, preferring to use religion as an all-encompassing tool for mobilization. This has helped its dictators and autocrats amass power — prolonging their tenures, stifling dissent and building nuclear bombs. But it has undermined the country’s most vulnerable community twofold: Pakistani Christians have both lost their claim to caste-based affirmative action and acquired the hazardous, Taliban-baiting title of a “religious minority.”
What we have, then, is the peculiar despair of a people who are unable to articulate their real grievance, a people who have no political parties or voting blocs of their own, who have only churches and pastors and the eternal motifs of suffering and deliverance to see them through this dark period.
To live in present-day Pakistan is to know all this in one’s bones. It is to recognize a welter of prejudices related to the word “Christian,” with its caste associations of waste and blood and a rarely acknowledged but ingrained sense of primordial difference. Indeed, it is to know a long-buried secret about this “Islamic” country, a secret about how religion is used to paper over caste, class and political tensions that threaten, with ever-growing frequency, to rupture the fabric of its society.
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