In another disturbing case of violence against Pakistan’s marginalized Christian minority, a sanitation worker was brutally assaulted and left chained in the street for hours by a Muslim family angered over delayed garbage collection.
Yasir Masih, 35, was found severely beaten and shackled to a chair in the blistering heat in Lahore’s Gujjarpura neighborhood on Tuesday. His body was covered in bruises after being attacked with iron rods and repeatedly punched and kicked, according to his father-in-law Hussain Masih.
The vicious assault occurred after Masih, a Christian employed by the city’s sanitation department, did not immediately clean the doorstep of Muhammad Khadim Hussain’s home as demanded. Masih explained he would complete the request after finishing his official street cleaning duties.
However, when Masih later arrived at Hussain’s residence, he was lured to the roof where Hussain, his son, and three others were waiting. They proceeded to violently beat him before shackling him to a chair out on the street.
“I found my son-in-law chained on a chair, his body was full of bruises”, recalled Hussain Masih.
Though still restrained, the bloodied victim managed to drag himself into the street where passersby eventually noticed and alerted his family, who had grown concerned over his absence from work that morning.
Christians in Pakistan are often referred to as Chuhra (low caste), a pejorative term used for sanitation workers. They continue to suffer the same discrimination and are pushed to jobs seen as degrading. In Pakistan, road sweepers are mostly Christians and are referred to by other abusive slurs.
Recently, a Christian man was nearly lynched, looted and his shoe factory was set ablaze because he was accused of blasphemy. These deplorable incidents are just the latest example of the deeply-rooted discrimination, violence, and lack of basic rights faced by Pakistan’s Christian minority community. Such abuses, often borne from perceived insults to the Muslim majority, occur with little accountability.