IMAGINE the following scenario: a complex housing a mosque, a madressah, a girls` school and a home for the elderly being run by a Muslim charity is broken into at dawn and bulldozed by officials. No notice is served, and no documents challenging ownership are produced. Yet, within hours, the buildings are reduced to rubble, residents are made homeless, and copies of religious texts destroyed. Supervising this operation is the top local bureaucrat who pays no heed to the protests of the ulema in charge of the complex. Think of the outcry across the entire Muslim world. Demonstrations outside the embassies of the country that allowed this injustice to happen would have broken out instantly.

But when the Punjab government recently carried out a similar operation against Gosha-i-Aman, a Christian charity in Lahore, everybody in and out of Pakistan stood by silently. The chief minister, no doubt eyeing the two acres of land his minions had so brutally seized from the Catholic church, had nothing to say.

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