Pakistani Hindus seek safety in India

KARACHI: Preetam Das is a good doctor with a hospital job and a thriving private clinic, yet all he thinks about is leaving Pakistan, terrified about a rise in killings and kidnappings targeting Hindus.

A successful professional, he lives in Karachi with his wife and two children, but comes from Kashmore, a district in north of Sindh. His family has lived there for centuries, and in 1947, when the sub-continent split between India, a majority Hindu state, and Pakistan, a homeland for Muslims, Das’ grandparents chose to stay with the Muslims. They fervently believed the promise of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah that religious minorities would be protected. Sixty years later, their grandson says life in Kashmore had become unbearable.

“The situation is getting worse every day,” he says. Two of his uncles have been kidnapped and affluent Hindus are at particular risk from abduction gangs looking for ransom, he says.

Rights activists say the climate is indicative of progressive Islamisation over the last 30 years that has fuelled an increasing lack of tolerance to religious minorities, too often considered second-class citizens. Das says the only thing keeping him in Pakistan is his mother. “She has flatly refused to migrate, which hinders my plans. I can’t go without her,” he said.

Hindus make up 2.5 percent of the 174 million people living in Pakistan. Over 90 percent lived in Sindh where they were generally wealthy and enterprising, making them easy prey for criminal gangs.

An official at the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi, who declined to be named said, “Every month about eight to 10 Hindu families migrate from Pakistan. Most of them are well-off.” He had no comment on whether the number was on the rise, but Hindu community groups in Pakistan said more people were leaving because of kidnappings, killings and even forced conversions of girls to Islam. “Two of my brothers have migrated to India and an uncle to the UAE,” said Jay Ram, a farmer in Ghotki. “It’s becoming too difficult to live here. Sindhis are the most tolerant community in the country vis-a-vis religious harmony, but deteriorating law and order is forcing them to move unwillingly,” he added.

Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, chief of the Pakistan Hindu Council and a former lawmaker for Sindh province, said Hindus were picked on by kidnappers and that their daughters were subject to forced conversions to Islam. “Every now and then we get reports of families migrating. It’s getting worse now. People are extremely harassed and are forced to leave their homeland but our rulers are shamelessly idle,” he told AFP. Rights activists also say Hindus in Sindh were discriminated against. “Recently 37 members of five Hindu families migrated to India from Thul town owing to discrimination, while three Hindus, including a doctor, were murdered in Shikarpur district,” said Rubab Jafri, who heads Sindh’s Human Rights Forum. “Lots of violent incidents are happening daily. Most go unreported, which shows vested interests are trying to force Hindus to leave Pakistan.” According to the Pakistan Hindu Seva, a community welfare organisation, at least 10 families had migrated from Sindh every month since 2008, mostly to India, but in the last 10 months, 400 families had left. Another survey last year by the local Scheduled Caste Rights Movement said more than 80 percent of Hindu families complained that Muslims discriminated against them by using different utensils when serving them at food stalls.

India is not a nation-state in the sense of France or Germany. I would take exception to your statement of a "normal" nation-state. Firstly the construct of a nation-state as we know it is fairly recent -- dating from after the French Revolution.

prior to that you were in kingdoms and your allegiance was to a person. That is why there were proposals for Russia to be renamed Petrovia under Peter the Great and not much "nationalist" opposition. That is why a "German" like Copernicus could pledge allegiance to a Polish king against the "German" Teutonic knights

Also, a "normal" nation-state is a mono-ethnic, mono-religious entity. It was purely a construct of Western Europe from the late 1700s: for instance until the French revolution barely 10% of France spoke what we call French -- they spoke Breton or Basque or o'il or Gascon.

the 1800s was the time when there came a consolidation and a clamping down on minorities -- which is when the English attempted to stamp out Manx, Welsh, Cornish etc., when the French stamped out the regional languages, when the German Empire attempted to force the Poles to speak only German, when the Russian Empire attempted to force Poles etc. to speak only Russian.

I give European examples because those were the states which were at the forefront of this nation-state creation. in Asia you had Siam doing the same and the Japanese had been doing it for a long time to the Ainu etc.

I would argue that the "normal" state is always a multi-ethnic,multi-lingual and multi-religious one -- right from the state of Sargon II of Akkad in 2000 BC.

The US is the best example of why this works in the long run. Japan is the best example of why it may work in the short-run but in the long run the consolidation is not good for the nation as it turns more insular.

the natural state is a mix where you have say Germans living in the Ukraine alongside Ruthenians, Russian, Poles, Jews, Armenians, Tartars, Romanians, Greeks etc.

In India's case there is the historical sense of being 'Bharatiya' just as Europeans have the sense of being "European". Both started off in the quasi-religious or religious sense.

Neither made the leap to assimilation as the Hans did in China -- probably because there was never one dominant culture as in China, but myriad żródła sources.

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