Pakistan Set Aside August 11 for Its Minorities. Police in Gujranwala Spent It Booking a Christian Laborer for Blasphemy.
A capital charge over a video no outlet has seen, a wife nobody will locate, and a village some of its Christians have left.
Amir Masih is thirty. He is a laborer from Dhala Sharif, a village near Nowshera Virkan in Gujranwala District, in Pakistan's Punjab. He is married and has no children. On August 11 the police at Nowshera Virkan registered a First Information Report against him, number 1189 of 2026, under three sections of the Pakistan Penal Code. One of them, Section 295-C, carries the death penalty.
August 11 is National Minorities Day in Pakistan. It marks the 1947 speech in which Muhammad Ali Jinnah told the new state that a citizen's religion was to be no business of the government. Three weeks ago this site wrote about the people that day is for, and about the name they have given it: a day of demand. In Gujranwala that morning the demand was answered with a police file.
The complaint came from three Muslim men of the same village. They told police that at about eleven the previous morning, at a public call office in Dera Chowk, Masih had said things that offended their religion. They also said he had shared a video on social media. According to the FIR, it showed Christian and Islamic imagery with a Punjabi voiceover that the complainants took to be comparing the two faiths.
No outlet reporting the case has seen the video. Nobody has established that the account was his. And by the time the first rights group put its findings on paper, he had been in custody for eighteen days.
