Pakistan (MNN) — And 2021 marks 10 years since the assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti, the first Christian parliamentarian in Pakistan’s government. He supported religious freedom for all and opposed Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Because of this, extremists killed him.
Nehemiah of FMI says his assassination foreshadowed the radical shift Pakistani culture would make over the next 10 years. “Pakistani society has become a more intolerant society. And the government and establishment in Pakistan, it’s very sad to say that they did not condemn these attacks. They did not counter anything against this. But somehow they were supporting these actions of the Taliban in Pakistan.”
Taliban in Pakistan
In many ways, Nehemiah says extremism has become the norm in Pakistan. “Taliban is not a person who has a long beard or who’s holding AK-47 or something. This is a mindset in Pakistani society now. Even a person who is teaching in a university, a professor, could be Taliban. A person who is driving with an online taxi app in Pakistan could be a Taliban. And in 10 years, we see it has increased a lot.”
Pakistani Christians live without a voice in their own country. Ask God to give them wisdom as they live and minister in a perilous context.
The header photo shows Islamabad, the city where Shabaz Bhatti was killed. (Photo courtesy of Abdul Baqi, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
