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W hen Presbyterian missionaries began working in earnest in northwest India in the nineteenth century, they made the greatest headway among the poorest of the poor. As a result, most Christians in Pakistan, formed out of colonial India, are descendants of untouchables, families at the lowest level of the Hindu caste system. Very few Pakistani Muslims have ever converted to Christianity.

Most Pakistani Christians today still do the same work as their untouchable ancestors: sweeping the streets and doing other menial jobs deemed ritually or literally unclean by higher-caste Hindus.

DOUBLE DISCRIMINATION: In the serene capital city of Islamabad, Christians live in makeshift squatter settlements carefully hidden from public view, enjoying no property rights or legal access to electricity or drinking water, and under threat from a city relocation scheme. In February, a Christian community of 250 households in Islamabad received seven days' notice to clear out.

Over tea in the cramped sitting room of a low-ceilinged, makeshift home, Iqbal S. Bhindar, chair of Building the Future Together, a Christian organization established to find alternatives for squatters such as himself, says the land on which they live belongs to the city government.

"They can clear us out any time," Bhindar says. "They haven't moved us out yet, but they haven't given us any facilities, either."

Aslam Ghouri, the group's general secretary, adds, "They've been taking from us for years, and now they're trying to kick us out."

Pakistani Christians of all social classes endure an atmosphere of unending harassment and humiliation. "They call you names like sweeper," says a Christian human-rights worker in Lahore. "So Christians are twice discriminated against, both for their religion and for the work they do.

"My mother says that when she was young, there wasn't this Christian-Muslim problem. The majority of the Christians never migrated from India. This is our land. It is actually the Muslims who migrated." When Pakistan was formed by partition from India in 1947, the country, whose name may be interpreted to mean land of the religiously pure, was designed to be a homeland for Muslims.

DEATH FOR BLASPHEMY? Although intense discrimination has made daily life traumatic for Christians, the enforcement of Pakistan's blasphemy law has made being a Pakistani Christian potentially lethal.

Since October 1996, Ayub Masih, 35, has been jailed while appealing his conviction for blasphemy, which carries a mandatory death penalty.

In 1986, military dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq, as part of his Islamization campaign, amended the blasphemy code to allow the courts to issue a death sentence against anyone who dishonored the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

Muslim extremists have aggressively used the tough code against Hindus, the Ahmadiyya (a heretical Muslim sect), and Christian untouchables, who make up a combined 3 percent of the country's 141 million people.

"With these laws, any Muslim can easily bring a legal case against you," Pakistani expert Cris Toffolo of the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, said recently to Presbyterian News Service. Cases are difficult to dismiss, because judges are often threatened.

Muslim mobs sometimes do not wait for court rulings and have killed two Christians after they were accused of blasphemy. Also, one judge was murdered in 1997 after he acquitted two Christian defendants of blasphemy.

Although the government has not actually carried out any executions, three other Christians have been convicted of blasphemy during this decade.

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April 26 1999, Vol. 43, No. 5