Islamabad, Oct 16 (IANS) Pakistan’s rising human rights abuses against minorities, including Christians, Hindus, and Ahmadis, along with a recent scandal of brazen election rigging, has exposed how deeply disenfranchisement has seeped into the country’s social fabric, a report said on Thursday.
It added that during the 60th session of the UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC), multiple reports, statements, and firsthand testimonies detailing state-sponsored atrocities against minorities in Pakistan were shared by victims.
According to a report in ‘European Times’, amid a worsening economy and the growing dominance of the military under Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir, the country’s so-called democratic institutions have completely weakened, leaving citizens mired in injustice and disillusionment.
“Religious minorities in Pakistan face systematic persecution and rising violence carried out with impunity. United Nations experts have sounded the alarm over “increasing violence against vulnerable communities on grounds of their religion or belief,” noting that minorities have endured relentless attacks, killings, and unending harassment in recent months,” the report stated.
“The Ahmadiyya Muslim community has seen an unprecedented surge in targeted persecution. In the past year alone, Ahmadis have suffered killings, arbitrary arrests, and even desecration of their places of worship and cemeteries. As UN experts put it, Pakistan must ‘break the pattern of impunity’ whereby perpetrators of anti-minority violence operate without fear, often with tacit official complicity,” it noted.
The report stressed that Christians and other non-Muslim minorities face similar hardships, with blasphemy allegations frequently used to incite mob violence against the Christian community.
It said that the offenders are rarely caught, and the judiciary often colludes with the intelligence agencies. The report asserted that Christian and Hindu girls remain “particularly vulnerable” to abduction and forced conversion by extremists, with cases often “validated by the courts” under the pretext of religious marriages.
It also highlighted that ethnic minority communities in Pakistan have similarly borne the brunt of state repression.
“The country’s 40-million-strong Pashtun community has endured military campaigns and counterterrorism operations that frequently trample human rights. Pashtun activists claim that under the cover of fighting Islamist militants, security forces have carried out extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture of Pashtun civilians for years,” the report detailed.
“A similar story unfolds in Balochistan, home to the ethnic Baloch minority, where a decades-long insurgency has been met with brutal state force. Hundreds of Baloch activists and suspected dissidents have ‘disappeared’ or been found dead over the years, and protests by families of the missing are often met with harassment,” it added.
The report emphasised that the human rights crisis in Pakistan is intensified by a concurrent assault on democracy itself, culminating in the controversy surrounding the 2024 “rigged” general election.
“The developments of 2024-2025 paint a bleak picture: Pakistan’s democratic façade is crumbling under the weight of its military’s unchecked power, and its minorities are the first victims of this hybrid ‘democratic-cum-military’ rule,” it stated.
–IANS
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