In yet another incident reaffirming the persecution of minorities in Pakistan, the angry mob of Muslims gathered around the Sikh shrine of Gurudwara Nanakana Sahib and started pelting stones at it. The Muslim mob that is laying siege at Gurudwara in Nankana Sahib was led by the family of Mohammad Hassan, the boy who allegedly kidnapped and converted Sikh girl Jagjit Kaur.
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As can be seen from the video shared by the journalist Ravinder Singh Robin, enraged Muslim mob laid siege to the Sikh shrine and started baying for the blood of the Sikhs. According to the reports, there are 30 Sikh devotees believed to be trapped inside the Gurudwara.
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Hundreds of Muslims protestors swarmed the Gurudwara Nankana Sahib and raised inflammatory slogans against the Sikhs. “We will not let any Sikh live in Nankana Sahib and will its name to Ghulam-e-Mustafra,” one of the irate Muslim protestors exclaimed.
The police along with the Pakistani Rangers and Army had rushed to the spot to quell the protest but so far they had failed in dispersing the violent mob away from the Gurudwara.
In August 2019, Mohammad Hassan allegedly abducted Jagjit Kaur, a daughter of a Sikh priest in Nankana Sahib, and forcibly married her after converting her into Islam. A video had gone viral showing one of the girl’s family members claiming that a group of men barged into their house, abducted Kaur, forcibly converted her to Islam and made her marry Hassan. However, Hassan denied having kidnapped the girl, claiming that she had married him out of her own volition. This resulted in clashes between the Sikh and Muslim community of Nankana Sahib.
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The incident underscores the precarious condition of minorities in Pakistan, who live under constant fear of persecution at the hands of the Muslim majority. It also shows that the Kartarpur corridor initiative by Pakistan was just a smokescreen, an attempt to create fissures between the Indian government and Indian Sikhs and to hide the abject conduct meted out to the minorities in Pakistan.
While Pakistan PM Imran Khan blathers about the perceived persecution of minorities in India and accuses the Indian government of being fascist and racist, his own country, Pakistan, treats its minorities as second-class citizens, depriving them of their basic rights and subjecting them to violence and brutality. It is to this end, that the Indian government enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act that intends to grant citizenship to persecuted minorities-Jains, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Buddhists and Hindus from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.