The marginalised identity markers stemming from gender, caste, class, and minority religion add multiple vulnerabilities to the lives of Christians in Pakistan, which I documented in my book Swept Aside, A Story of Christian Sweepers in Lahore. Religious discrimination is not only experienced by the impoverished working classes of minority communities, instead, it cuts across class barriers. For instance, I have earned the privilege of being in the upper middle class, however, I could not escape the subtle kind of discrimination from one of my Muslim neighbors, who refused to greet me on my religious festivals and declined to eat the cooked food I send to their home due to my religious identity. Living with such constant burdens negatively impacts socio-cultural relations and eclipses one’s access to building healthy social networking and peaceful cohesion.

Thinking through these conundrums and complexities, I inquired how disadvantaged intersectional identities interlock and impact people's access to equal opportunities and better prospects? The question of caste has not been widely investigated in Pakistan, and the international academic discourse on caste gravitates global attention to our neighboring country India. However, caste fraternities are quite prevalent in the socio-cultural exchange/transactions and political preferences in Pakistan. Therefore, bringing forth an analytical understanding of caste was a key objective for me in my research.

Several research studies have substantiated the historical lineage of the Christian communities to the downtrodden outcaste groups; chur, chamar, and chandals, who had gone through en masse religious conversions from 1870s to 1920s by western missionaries in the Indian sub-continent. The Chuhras, under the Brahmanic caste system, were assigned tasks such as picking up dead animals, removing excreta, hanging the criminals, and skinning the dead animals and were perpetually destined to work in degrading occupations and known as ritually impure/paleed. Change of religion did offer some social upward mobility to these low castes; however, the centuries-old ancestral occupation of most Christians remains the same today.

Currently, a sizeable number of Christians overwhelmingly dominate the waste removal work and live in ghettoised slums in both urban peripheries and rural settings. Christians are ranked at 6 percent of the total 14.4 million population of Lahore, whereas more than 90% of the lower hierarchy workers/sweepers in the sanitation services belong to the Christian community.

While I was doing my field research in the years 2017 to 2020, the incidents of caste-based discrimination were routinely found in the everyday experiences of Christian sweepers. Women sweepers were ridiculed, harassed, and called by derogatory slurs such as churi, bhangi, and paleed (dirty) etc. Many have internalised such humiliating behaviors as their fate. Having no other choice for economic survival, women sweepers show extraordinary resilience to cope with the vagaries of wounded encounters and continue working. For a waste worker/janitor, a broom is both a sign of shame and stigma, and a symbol of subsistence. These social inequalities, exclusionary cultural practices, and economic deprivation limit the life choices and opportunities of this deprived community.

The frontline sweepers are not provided safety and protective gear such as proper uniforms, gloves, shoes, and masks, which makes them extremely vulnerable to hazardous health problems. My research has found many sweepers suffering from diseases, such as skin ailments, eye problems, and postural aches. The supply of janitorial workers/sweepers is leased out to private contractors by the Lahore Waste Management Company, which makes the job excessively insecure and precarious, as it deprives sweepers of welfare safety and work-related benefits such as health insurance, medical leaves, and pensions. It underlines how caste prejudice and customary ‘master-servant’ relations* combine with neoliberal employment designs to enhance their vulnerability to both traditional and modern forms of exploitation.

The inculcation of religious nationalism in Pakistan framed by reference to the singularity of a majority religion in state laws and policies has further placed religious minorities in a subservient position. In my research, I draw attention to the serious implications and consequences for religious minorities of this inherent contradiction with regards to equality of citizenship. Christians often use their religious identity as a tool of political mobilisation to seek resources from the State in the political and administrative domains such as reserved seats in the parliament and employment quotas/affirmative actions. Those Christians, who have progressed to relatively prosperous groups deny their community’s association with low caste identity.

Christian leaders belonging to clergy and parliamentarians do not want to use their low caste identity as a political agency and therefore, are reluctant to highlight the problems of Christian sweeper communities. Interestingly the educated class of Christians and the local clergy deny this historical trajectory of the Punjabi Christians and repeatedly disassociate the history of Christianity in the subcontinent from the religious conversion of the Chuhra caste. This denial and disconnect with the question of low caste by upper-class Christians further de-narrativise the pains and perils of Christian sweepers in Pakistan.

Christian women from the sweeper community have joined other professions in the service sector such as nursing, teaching, working as domestic help or in beauty salons. These women routinely face double discrimination at their workplaces due to their gender and minority identity. Religious discrimination in the workplace is not an employment-protected legal category by the state law in Pakistan which adds to this precarity.

One can easily spot poor and dilapidated Christian localities in either the back streets or peripheries of Lahore. Christian sweeper communities prefer to live with their co-religionists, which itself speaks about their insecurity and fear of integrating with the larger society. Religious fanaticism has also led to increasing incidents the mob violence against Christian communities. As was witnessed in the Jaranwala incident in Faisalabad in August 2023, in which, the series-led mob attack against the local Christian community had destroyed and desecrated at least 24 churches and several dozen smaller chapels, scores of houses after the alleged accusation of blasphemy against Christians. We know the Jaranwala incident is not one of its kind. The same pattern of mob violence against the poor settlements of the Christian community following the alleged accusation of blasphemy had occurred in previous incidents, such as Shanti Nagar in 1997, Sangla Hill in 2005, Gojra in 2009, Kot Radha Kishan-Kasur in 2014 and Joseph Colony in 2012. As I write this article another news of mob violence ransacking Christian families in Sargodha after an alleged accusation of blasphemy was reported in the newspaper. This unchecked hate speech against marginalised communities in social media, and the lack of hard-hitting response by the state institutions against such atrocities coupled with the prevalence of caste-driven prejudices leave very little space for corrective measures. However, this scenario keeps posing a question to both the state and society that for how long do we have to endure such injustices in the face of such violent incidents?

Dr. Ayra Indrias Patras is an Assistant Professor at the Forman Christian College University, Lahore

Notes

• Charles Amjad-Ali, “From Dislocation to Dislocation the Experience of the Christian Community in Pakistan,” International Review of Modern Sociology 41 (2015), 5
• Frederick Stock and Margaret Stock, People Movements in the Punjab: with Special Reference to the United Presbyterian Church (Bombay: Gospel Literature Service, 1978).
• *The master-slave dialectic, also known as the lord-bondsman dialectic, is a pivotal concept in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. 
• Asif Aqeel and Ayra Indrias Patras, " Punjabi Christians' Disconnect and Denial of their History," inInternational Conference on The Punjab History and Culture 6-8 January, eds. Sajid Mahmood Awan and Rahat Zubair Malik (Lahore, Centre of Excellence, Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad, 2020), 591