Civic Equality Quotes
The Punjab had been partitioned into a Pakistani part and an Indian part. The latter was a major province of the new state. But in the political process of drawing the boundaries, Jinnah and other Muslim leaders had used fanatic Muslim terrorists to massacre Sikhs and Hindus to ethnically cleanse areas and intimidate the ruling Indian Congress Party and the British government to obtain more area and resources for the Muslim state. However, at this point he had to govern, and there were still many Sikhs and Hindus as well as Christians and Buddhists in the new Muslim state. Jinnah's new state needed all the help it could get from the U. S. and others, and Jinnah started sounding like a passionate democrat. On paper religious freedom was guaranteed in Pakistan. However Pakistan became one of the most dangerous countries in the world for non-Muslims. Most historians agree that the Muslim terrorism in the short run had worked, as it would have been unlikely that India would have been partitioned in the absence of violence. However, it set in motion a cultural pattern of religious hate, bigotry, intolerance, violence and murder which would plague Pakistan thereafter. The politicians throughout the country's history have tried to use the Muslim religious, fundamentalist, extremists for their purposes only to find that the fanatics were out of control and the entire Pakistani population has lived in fear, lest an extremist decide that what they did or say was inimical to Islam and assassinate him or her. They have assassinated even the highest levels of politicians—President, Governors of Provinces, National Legislatures as well as Journalists, writers and academics. But the average Pakistani citizen has always been at risk of brutal murder with hundreds killed every year in an atmosphere of total impunity for the murderers. They have even murdered married women who had been raped on the grounds that they were adulterers and were therefore stoned.
This document was Drafted by members of America’s leading faiths and signed by the Presidents, two Supreme Court Chief Justices, and nearly 200 other leading citizens.
