Category: Asia

Set up to fail: Pakistan’s Single National Curriculum will only make life harder for religious minority children

Posted on by cswpress in Asia, Pakistan

In July 2020, the government of Pakistan announced the creation of a ‘Single National Curriculum’ (SNC) to replace its 2006 school curriculum. Given the country’s long history of discriminatory practices in educational settings, and the SNC’s stated objective of providing “all children… a fair and equal opportunity to receive high quality education,” one would have expected this to be a welcome development for minorities in Pakistan, a chance to tackle inequalities and division from the ground up.

Sadly, this was not the case.

In an attempt to make the proposed curriculum more digestible to Pakistan’s more conservative Islamist elements, and particularly to win the support of the country’s madrassahs (Islamic religious schools), the government of Punjab granted the Islamic Muttahida Ulema Board (MUB) a role in the review and approval of all textbooks under the SNC.

This has proved disastrous, providing the MUB with an opportunity to reinforce the sectarian and divisive agendas which have permeated the Pakistani education system for decades.

Continue reading “Set up to fail: Pakistan’s Single National Curriculum will only make life harder for religious minority children” →

Pastors or fraudsters? Neither registered nor unregistered religious leaders are safe from the Chinese Communist Party’s false allegations

Posted on by cswpress in Asia, China

Under China’s current religious regulations, only government-approved faith leaders can carry out government-approved religious activities in government-approved sites. As a result, there are many situations in which a religious leader can find themselves on the wrong side of the law in China, even facing charges that have no apparent connection to religion but can carry lengthy sentences.

The widely-reported cases of Pastor Wang Yi and Pastor Yang Hua highlight how the Chinese authorities prosecute leaders of unregistered Protestant churches with flagrantly baseless criminal charges: ‘inciting to subvert state power’ and ‘illegal business operations’ for Wang and ‘divulging state secrets’ for Yang. Alarmingly, fraud charges seem to have become one of the most damaging tools that the authorities use against pastors, for persecution as well as defamation.

Elder Zhang Chunlei

On 1 May 2021, the day the new administrative measures on religious clergy came into effect, Love Reformed Church received a notice saying their leader Zhang Chunlei had been officially arrested ‘on suspicion of fraud’. To this, the unregistered church in Guiyang in Guizhou province expressed incredulity in a prayer update issued on the same day.

Continue reading “Pastors or fraudsters? Neither registered nor unregistered religious leaders are safe from the Chinese Communist Party’s false allegations” →

Conversion as an act of self-liberation: A history of the Dalit community in India

Posted on by cswpress in Asia, India

On 7 June 2020, a Dalit Christian man named Bura Singh, his wife and daughter were conducting prayers in their house in Madhya Pradesh, India, when police officials barged in and beat them up.

For Bura, his conversion to Christianity was a matter of faith. For many other Dalits like him, however, conversion to a religion other than Hinduism is not just a matter of faith, it’s also a means – the only means – to escape the centuries-old harassment and injustice meted out to them under the caste system.

Historically, and even today, Dalits who choose to convert to another religion are socially boycotted and harassed. But to understand why there is so much opposition to Dalit conversion by the upper castes, we must understand the origins of the caste system and the history of the Dalit struggle.

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From one crackdown to another: The life of Xu Na

Posted on by cswpress in Asia, China

In China, June is a sombre month for those who remember the mass pro-democracy protests across the country and the military’s bloody crackdown in 1989. Remembrance itself is an act of defiance against the suppression and manipulation of history by the Chinese authorities. Each year, events are held worldwide to pay tributes to the victims and their families.

What is less widely reported however, is how survivors’ lives have been changed by the tragic events of  ‘June 4th’, as the events are known in China.

One of the protesters on Tiananmen Square was Xu Na, then a student at Beijing Broadcasting Institute (BBI). She was holding a banner with her fellow friends that read “Freedom of the Press; Freedom of Speech” while marching through the Beijing streets. Thirty-two years later, Xu Na is in another place in Beijing: Dongcheng District Detention Centre, where she has been criminally detained for the past 11 months.

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Recognising the remarkable: A call for the release of Nguyen Bac Truyen

Posted on by cswpress in Asia, Vietnam

“He never refused anyone who needed his assistance… He was doing his work with much humility… I believe that he belongs to a human category that could not ignore any injustices that happened around him.”

Vu Quoc Dung, human rights defender with Veto!

“He is a man of honour, admired and respected by many”

A supporter1 of Nguyen Bac Truyen

“Standing up for one’s own community is admirable; but standing up on behalf of others, when you yourself are being oppressed – that is truly courageous.”

Ed Brown, Secretary-General at Stefanus Alliance International
Continue reading “Recognising the remarkable: A call for the release of Nguyen Bac Truyen” →