PTI spokeswoman Dr. Shireen Mazari tried to explain to WWM the context for the remarks: “The previous government had recruited a lot of politically motivated recruits into the Peshawar Municipal Corporation, who had then refused to work as sweepers and stressed that they should be posted to other jobs.
“So Khattak said that if these guys claim that they cannot do the sweepers’ job because they are Muslim, then fire them all, and hire those who are prepared to work, like unemployed Christians in Peshawar. The Chief Minister never said that Christians should be hired only as sweepers, or that Muslims were banned from being taken as sweepers.”
The Municipal United Workers’ Union President Mushtaq Masih told World Watch Monitor that in Peshawar Municipal Corporation there are 935 sanitary workers and 111 of them are Muslims. “Muslim sweepers are like kings,” he said, “they do nothing but regularly receive their salary.” He said recruitment of these Muslims was politically motivated, and so their workload is shifted to the Christian sweepers.
“Tired of this situation, I wrote a long letter to the Chief Minister, and handed it to KPK Assembly Member Fredrick Azeem,” Masih recalled. “I stressed that sweepers’ jobs must only be given to the Christians and not to Muslims because they don’t work.” He said that, based on his letter, the KPK Chief Minister had issued an order and a press release.
Azeem, selected by the country’s ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) on a minority reserved seat, verified that he had taken up the matter in the KPK Assembly. “I presented 12 points, and the most important were: giving a pension to sweepers in one instalment, paying their salary through the bank, and not recruiting any Muslim to the post of sweeper, because they don’t do this work,” he said. “On July 2, the Chief Minister in his speech on the budget announced that no Muslim would be hired as a sweeper and also issued a directive in this regard.”
KPK Assembly member Soran Singh, PTI Gen. Secretary of its minority wing, who also raised the matter, said that it was a long-standing demand of the sweepers that no Muslim be hired for this job. “My heart goes out to the Christian community and this is my mission to change their future,” he said.
Mushtaq Asi, former present of the Sweepers’ Union in Lahore, said he agrees that these jobs should only be given to the Christians because he says Muslims do not actually “do” this work.
