On the day when Bharat started the 400th Parkash Purab celebrations of Guru Tegh Bahadur at Red Fort, local Muslims, in connivance with local administration, badly thrashed former President of Pakistan Sikh Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee Mastan Singh and his two sons, Dilawar Singh and Palla Singh in Pakistan’s Nankana Sahib.
The matter came to light with the testimony of Dilawar Singh that went viral on social media platforms.
Dilawar Singh said he and his family own five and a half acres of land in Nankana Sahib and don’t want to sell it. But the local Muslims and the administration have been putting pressure on him for the last ten years to sell the plot of land.
In the viral video shot in the hospital where Mastan Singh and Palla Singh are undergoing treatment, Dilawar Singh said, “We are the ones who raise the slogans for freedom. Do watch what has happened to us. For the last ten years, these people have repeatedly assaulted us. We had a fight with them in Nankana today. I am Dilawar Singh. I live in Nankana Sahib. My maternal uncle and we have our own lands there. It is around five and a half acres of land. We have somehow managed to maintain it. But the people and the police keep on negotiating with us. This bothers us. Today, when we were harvesting the crop, a few people suddenly came there and beat us brutally.”
“They fired some bullets from the guns they had. They did this for threatening us. This is my brother. He is injured as they beat him with sticks. Two more persons have left this hospital a while ago after getting treatment for the injuries they sustained in this fight. Nobody listens to us. We are presented as jokers in society. Tell me how come we are free? Is this the freedom we have here? These people are causing harm to us and our properties here. Forget freedom, we are not safe here in the first place. Real freedom is that here I can say a thing on this camera that our matter is not solved for the last ten years. We are troubled by everyone including the police here. We are treated like jokers. I request the Supreme Court to listen to our plea,” he further said in the same video.
Pakistani diplomat and writer Farahnaz Ispahani had said the number of minorities in Pakistan had reduced from 23% in 1947 to a mere 3-4% of the population. In her book Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan’s Religious Minorities, she blamed the continuous persecution of minorities under different regimes in Pakistan for the current state of affairs. She was also the media advisor to the president of Pakistan from 2008 to 2012.
In a report in March 2020, The Diplomat said since Imran Khan took over as the country’s prime minister, the condition of minorities has not improved a bit, and the atrocity statistics have only worsened. There have been 31 deaths, 58 injuries, and 25 cases of blasphemy.
