Pakistan: Our treatment of Hindus

EDITORIAL

The reports in the media that 60 Hindu families of Jacobabad, Sindh, have migrated to India because of insecurity are highly disturbing. In recent days, there have been a number of cases of Hindu girls converting to Islam because of the ostensible desire to marry Muslim boys. However, in almost all these cases, it is difficult to pin down the truth whether the conversions were freely undertaken or a combination of emotional, psychological, social and coercive factors. The increasing trend of Hindu traders and families’ complaints that their shops are looted, houses ransacked, women forcibly converted to Islam and kidnappings for ransom carried out paint a sorry picture of the plight of this peaceful and inoffensive minority community. What is even more disturbing than the actual ground realities that afflict the Hindu community in Sindh and Balochistan is the state of denial our authorities and government high officials are in. Chief Minister Sindh Qaim Ali Shah at least had the decency to respond to the reports by setting up a three-member committee led by Sindh Minister for Minority Affairs Mukesh Kumar Chawla to report back on the issue within a week.. However, the minister has already compromised the credibility of the committee even before it has started its work by stating that the reports of migration are exaggerated and Hindu girls are eloping with Muslim boys of their own free will. The SSP Jacobabad has delivered the priceless comment that security is being provided to the Hindu community. In other words all is well in the best of all possible worlds and the SSP can therefore go back to sleep. But the cake is taken by Interior Minister Rehman Malik. With his usual penchant for a strange and twisted take on most things, the interior minister sees conspiracies under every bed and behind every bush. This migration issue too, according to Rehman Malik’s wisdom, is a conspiracy involving the Indian High Commission for issuing visas for India to 250 Hindu citizens of Pakistan, ostensibly for religious pilgrimage. Interviews in the press with some of the departing Hindu families in Lahore, en route to Wagah, reveal a mixed picture. Some interviewees were quite candid that their lives had been turned into a living hell because of insecurity, and although they were travelling to India for a religious pilgrimage, might decide to stay on there if they found it convivial. Others were at pains to deny any intent to migrate. Those in the latter category may not have been speaking from the heart, or at least been cautious so as not to make matters for those staying behind even worse. Reports indicate that the 60 families who have torn themselves away from their and their forefathers’ homeland may only be the tip of the iceberg, or a possible tidal wave to follow. Ironically, while tearful relatives were bidding goodbye to the families leaving from the Lahore Railway Station, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US was reassuring an American audience that Pakistan protects the rights of religious minorities. On the very same day, President Asif Ali Zardari was speaking at a commemoration of National Minorities Day, declared on every August 11 in recognition of the message in the Quaid’s speech to the constituent assembly in 1947. The president stated that misuse of the blasphemy law would not be allowed. Both Ambassador Rehman and President Zardari’s statements are well intentioned and reflect the best of principles, but with due respect, they are divorced from our ground realities. Four decades of promotion of religious extremism in the name of jihad are now bearing their over-ripe malign fruit. Pakistani society today is riven with intolerance, religious prejudice and violence against religious minorities. In the case of the blasphemy law, it has not even spared Muslims. One only has to recall the tragedy of Governor Salmaan Taseer’s assassination to grasp the truth of this argument. So while the president and ambassador’s sentiments are praiseworthy, it must be stated without fear that the situation is far from sanguine or acceptable. Pakistan must roll back the tide of extremist darkness that increasingly threatens to drown out all rational, tolerant, inclusive views. The government and public will have to join hands if the extremists are to be held at bay and finally their inglorious and repressive ideology defeated.