Pakistan has finally released the
religious statistics of the 2017 nationwide census, as reported by The Pakistan Daily Times on 7 June 2021. The census shows a drop in the population"s percentage of Christians compared to 1998.
Thomas Muller, persecution analyst at World Watch Research, comments: "According to the latest census, 1.27% of all Pakistani citizens are Christian, down from 1.59% in the 1998 census. (In comparison, the census shows that the Hindu minority grew in the same time from 1.6% to 1.73%.) These results come as a disappointment to the Christian minority and have caused several questions to be raised. The most obvious question is: Why did it take the Bureau of Statistics more than three years to publish results for a census that was held in 2017? Another question would concern how well the census enumerators were trained in explaining the census and the religious affiliation section to the respondents. It should also be noted that many Christians are poor and illiterate and many may well have been completely left out of the census. Many of these Christians do not see a reason for obtaining a National Identity Card or for registering their children. Finally, it is also possible that the percentage has been kept low for political reasons as has been the case in other Asian countries. On the other hand, there is a wave of - better educated - Pakistani Christians migrating to other countries, thus reducing the number of Christians in Pakistan. The
World Christian Database (WCD), which uses government censuses as one source among others, gives the percentage of Christians in Pakistan as 1.9% for 2021 (WCD: Brill, accessed April 2021)."
Thomas Muller adds: "Regardless of whether inaccuracies could be proved, these census results mean that Christians will continue to enjoy little participation in politics and society and be marginalized in a way that could result in even more emigration. A recent reminder of how unprotected Christians are came when Arif Masih was
kidnapped and poisoned on 23 May 2021 in Tariqabad, after he had tried to report a harassment case against his sister (UCA News, 25 May 2021)."
