As Pakistan celebrates Independence Day on 14 August 2026, flags will decorate streets, patriotic songs will fill television screens, and political leaders will repeat familiar promises of unity, faith and discipline. Yet the most meaningful celebration would be an honest examination of whether independence has brought equal citizenship to every Pakistani — including Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Ahmadis, Parsis and other religious minorities.

The Arithmetic of Belonging

Any discussion of minority demographics must begin with accurate figures. The frequently repeated claim that minorities constituted 20 or 23 percent of present-day Pakistan in 1947 is misleading, because it usually combines West Pakistan with East Pakistan — now Bangladesh — where there was a large Hindu population. Pakistan did not conduct a census in 1947. According to the 1951 census, West Pakistan had approximately 432,978 Christians, representing about 1.3 percent of its population. Hindus numbered approximately 530,000, or 1.6 percent. Christians were therefore an important community, but they were never 20 percent of the population of present-day Pakistan.

This correction does not diminish the seriousness of minority exclusion. Religious minorities have grown in absolute numbers, but their share of the population has remained small. Partition-related migration, the separation of East Pakistan in 1971, discrimination, insecurity, unequal economic opportunity, forced conversions, and weaknesses in documentation have all shaped demographic trends. The enormous statistical decline so often quoted is principally connected to the loss of East Pakistan — not to the disappearance of millions of Christians from West Pakistan.

A Legacy Carved Before the Flag

Christians made contributions to the land that became Pakistan long before 1947. Christian institutions established some of the country’s finest schools, colleges and hospitals. They educated generations of Muslims and non-Muslims who later served in politics, the judiciary, civil administration, medicine, science and the armed forces. Christian nurses, teachers, doctors, sanitary workers and soldiers continued serving Pakistan after independence. These services deserve inclusion in textbooks, national museums and official Independence Day speeches.

The Man on the Marble

No single record makes the case more plainly than that of Alvin Robert Cornelius. Born in Agra to Professor I.J. Cornelius and Tara D’Rozario, he was already sitting on the bench of the Lahore High Court when Partition split the subcontinent in the summer of 1947. Where much of his extended family remained in India, Cornelius chose Pakistan — and rose to become its 4th Chief Justice, serving from 1960 to 1968, the second-longest tenure in the court’s history. He would later serve as Law Minister under General Yahya Khan. For his service he was awarded the state’s Hilal-e-Pakistan. He remains, to this day, the only non-Muslim to have headed Pakistan’s judiciary.

It is a fact worth sitting with as flags are raised this week: the republic’s highest court was once led, for eight consequential years, by a Christian jurist who chose to build his life inside Pakistan rather than leave it. His name belongs beside the slogans on Independence Day banners, not only on a marble slab in a Lahore cemetery.

1972: The Year the Schools Changed Hands

A particularly painful chapter began with the nationalization programme of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party government in 1972. The policy did not target Christians alone — it brought thousands of privately managed schools, colleges and other institutions under state control, including Muslim and missionary institutions alike. But its impact on the small Christian community was disproportionately severe. Research by the Centre for Social Justice records that 118 Christian or missionary educational institutions were nationalized. Some were later returned, including Forman Christian College — but the return process was incomplete, and in several well-documented cases, delayed for decades.

It would be historically inaccurate to describe nationalization as a secret conspiracy involving every political party. It was a declared socialist policy of the PPP government. Nevertheless, later governments led by the Pakistan Muslim League and other parties failed to repair its consequences fully.

A Debt Carried Forward

They did not return every institution promptly, compensate communities adequately, or help minorities rebuild their educational infrastructure. Political responsibility therefore extends beyond the government that introduced the policy to every successive government that allowed the injustice to continue.