The Punjab Ministry of Human Rights and Minority Affairs (MoHRMA) has launched a dedicated communication campaign containing messages of top community leaders, religious leaders and celebrities from various walks of life and faiths on peace, harmony and tolerance.
The campaign has been launched to counter the practice in which different sects and groups, especially the Shia pilgrims returning from Iran and members of Tablighi Jamaat, are being held responsible for spreading COViD19 in Pakistan. The ministry is running the campaign in collaboration with the Youth Development Foundation (YDF) – an organisation which has executed several projects on peace and interfaith harmony.
While launching the campaign, the MoHRMA minister Ijaz Augustine said the country cannot afford such divisions and hatemongering in these testing times. He said these positive messages coming from religious leaders of different sects and faiths and other notables will have the desired effect and help remove the misconceptions regarding COVID19 spread. The messages have been recorded and being broadcasted as Public Services Messages (PSMs). Banners, billboards and streamers have been placed all over Lahore. The campaign also extends to Okara, Multan, DG Khan and Bahawalpur.
The faith leaders whose messages have been collected include Raghib Naeemi, Allama Muhammad Akbar Hussain, Maulana Abdul Kabir Azad, Allama Tahir Ashrafi, Bishop Sebastian Francis Shaw and others.
YDF President Shahid Rehmat says these messages will also be disseminated through social media platforms, MoHRMA’s official page, local cable channels, regional and national TV channels, FM radios and newspapers. He said literary figure Ali Akbar Natiq has been engaged for script writing and creating the content. Shahid said the messages of Punjab Chief Minister Sardar Usman Buzdar and MoHRMA were also part of the campaign. The campaign, he said, is very timely because it is the priority of the stakeholders to stop stigmatisation and blamegame regarding the pandemic.
