What does the Constitution of Pakistan say about Racism?

Considering the law of Pakistan, the minorities are given their fundamental rights. There’s no discrimination in the current constitution of 1973 that positions the minorities of Pakistan below the Muslims. According to Islamic law which is the basis of the Pakistani law, the minorities have been given; freedom rights, property rights, cultural rights, social rights, and rights to protect their fundamentals. Hence the constitution of Pakistan safeguards the minorities in every possible way.

But, is there a law that punishes those who discriminate amongst the minorities? Are the minorities living in peace? Are they allowed to follow their religion freely and build their worship places? Is Pakistan free of the filthy concept of “racism”?Racism Blog 1

The answer is, no. Every country on this planet observes this obnoxious practice. If Muslims are discriminated, ridiculed, and killed for being the followers of Islam, Pakistan too has extremists, illiterate and uneducated people who follow the same path. If not very vividly or on a broader scale in many places, racism is being practiced in its smaller form.

There are many levels of racism which are practiced in Pakistan, it includes racial, religious, sectarian, tribal, provincial, and ethnic prejudices in Pakistan because Pakistan harbors a great diversity. Because of this, we come across several cases where a lot of marriages don’t take place because of the difference of caste and creed when such a clause doesn’t even exist in the Islamic Law. Moreover, the entire fiasco about “getting fairer” is nerve-wrecking for all the dark-skinned people out there, who never had a say in their skin color. Why does this problem still exist in 2020 and what sort of pleasure do people get by degrading dark-skinned guys or girls, that is something we cannot understand? People, if we talk about the majority of Pakistan i.e. Muslims, degrade their maids and lower staff because they pay them. Just because they pay them, they think they have bought the individual and not their services. Such unsettling mindsets do exist in Pakistan on a wider scale, but a lot of people do not acknowledge this as racism. Why not?Racism Blog 2

Will it only be called racism when a white man kills a black man over a counterfeit note? Surely, it is a heinous crime and cannot go unnoticed but we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that racism exists in milder, subtle forms that play with people’s mental health and deems them unfit or unacceptable by the society.

If such sort of issues exist majorly between Muslim-Muslim families, what can we say about the minorities in Pakistan? Christians, who make only 2% of the Pakistani population, are mostly seen working as sweepers or maids. Hindus, who make about 1.6% of the population, have faced a hard time during these past two years.  Countless of Hindu girls were forced to convert to Islam and were married off to Muslim men. Some of the incidents made it to the headlines, but what about the cold cases? Does anyone have any idea about that?

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Racism is historical as well as an existing problem – not only in Pakistan but worldwide. Sometimes it comes off in a subtle form while sometimes it comes in the form of death. We can only hope that in the future this pathetic phenomenon would come to an end and someday we could finally find peace with other people’s skins, races, and religions.