Seventy-five years after the Partition, Sikhs in Pakistan will finally get recognition and representation. For the first time, the census survey will include Sikhism as a distinct religion, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics has announced.
Until now, Sikhism was included in the ‘other religions’ category along with Hinduism and Christianity. This resulted in unreliable estimates of their population, leading to poorer representation in the government.
According to reports, this initiative is the culmination of a five-year court battle that was started by five Sikhs who filed a petition in the Peshawar High Court in March 2017. Even though the court ruled in their favour, no action was taken to comply with it. A year later, the Supreme Court of Pakistan ordered for a separate column for Sikhs in the population census forms released in Urdu.
It is a cause for celebration for the entire community, according to advocate Harjinder Singh Dhami, president of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) in Amritsar. He commended the five Sikhs from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa whose efforts brought recognition to the community. The move, he explained, will help Pakistani Sikhs obtain basic rights and representation in institutions.
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Irregularities in the census
For the most part, Pakistan’s Sikh community call Punjab their home. Only a small number live in Peshawar in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
After the 2017 census, VOA News reported that minorities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, and Sindh claimed that they had been undercounted.
Many Sikh bodies, including PSGPC (Pakistan Sikh Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee), protested the lack of inclusion in the census forms. With the controversy refusing to abate, Habibullah Khan, a spokesperson for the census exercise, admitted that it was a mistake on the part of the census authorities, Dawn reported.
This was despite the provincial statistics office being ordered by the Peshawar High Court to include the Sikh community in the national census form.
The Council of Common Interests—a constitutional committee that settles conflicts over power distribution between the federal government and the provinces—held several meetings to approve the 2017 census but failed to reach consensus.
Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) allies–the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan governments–eventually dropped their protests. But Sindh’s Pakistan People’s Party government argued that the Council of Common Interests ruling would result in an unequal distribution of federal resources.
In a population of 20.77 crore, the data on minority populations such as Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and others was not disclosed in the 2017 census. The minority group made up 3.72 per cent of Pakistan’s population as of the 1998 census, which is currently the only official data available. According to the official website, no separate data was provided for the Sikh community in the 1998 census either.