Pakistan: Christians Relegated to Manually Cleaning Sewers

Gabrielle ReyesApril 8, 2022

Pakistan’s predominantly Christian sewage workers regularly risk their lives to unclog sewers with their bare hands while enduring daily public discrimination for partaking in the dangerous labor, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on Wednesday.

Citing an original report by Agence France-Presse (AFP), the SCMP on April 6 detailed the daily toil of a Christian sanitary worker in Lahore named Shafiq Masih.

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“Each day, the 44-year-old has to go down into the sewers to clean up dark, stinking sludge. He has to contend with toxic gases and various pollutants,” according to the newspaper.

Masih is a Christian in Pakistan, which observes Islam as its official state religion. In addition to facing severe discrimination from his Muslim countrymen due to his religious beliefs, Masih has been practically forced into working a degrading job by Pakistan’s anti-Christian society.

Pakistan’s federal government regularly funds job advertisements specifying “menial cleaning jobs are reserved for ‘non-Muslims’, with the Centre for Law and Justice (CLJ), a local NGO, identifying nearly 300 such announcements over the past decade,” AFP reported on April 5.

Islamic purity beliefs lie at the root of Pakistan’s discriminatory practice of funneling non-Muslims, including Hindus, into the nation’s sanitation sector.

Most Pakistani Christians descend from lower-caste Indian Hindus who converted to Christianity “during the British colonial era in the hope of escaping a system that frequently forced them into a life of toil almost from birth,” according to AFP.

The minority constitutes less than two percent of Pakistan’s population of 227 million, though it accounts for “more than 80 percent of jobs involving refuse collection, sewage work and street sweeping” in Pakistan, according to data from the National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR).

The remainder of Pakistan’s sanitation jobs is filled mainly by Hindus, who account for an estimated 1.9 percent of the national population.

At least ten people have perished in Pakistan’s publically maintained sewers since 2019, according to CLJ figures.

“In October [2021] in Sargodha, two Christian sewage workers died rescuing a third who had been forced by his Muslim supervisors to enter a sewer he knew to be full of poisonous gas,” AFP recalled on April 5.

“Their families filed a complaint of criminal negligence — a first in the country — but agreed to an out-of-court settlement,” according to the news agency.

The October 2021 incident was reminiscent of a previous sewer tragedy in Pakistan involving three Christian workers in July 2017.

In this picture taken on March 10, 2022, workers of the Christian community from Lahore Waste Management Company clean a street in Lahore. (Photo by ARIF ALI/AFP via Getty Images)

Saleem Masih, 50; Danish Masih, 20; and Nadeem Masih, 18, all worked as janitors at a public school in Pakistan’s Punjab province when they were ordered to clear a blockage in a local sewer system. All three men died during their attempt to unblock the drainage system after being overtaken by a wave of toxic fumes. The men reportedly anticipated the sewer’s danger before descending but were denied protective equipment by their publically-funded employers.

One month earlier, in the Pakistani province of Sindh, a 35-year-old sewer worker died after he fell ill while working and was denied treatment by Muslim doctors. The physicians refused to treat the victim — who had been exposed to toxic fumes emanating from a sewer — because the episode occurred during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. The medics claimed it would have been impure to come into contact with a sanitation worker at the time.