In a thoughtful 2009 article, Issam Ahmad pointed to the vilification of religious minorities in Pakistani school textbooks. Part of the reason for that, more likely than not, has been the deeply chauvinist culture that gathered pace after General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s rise. Pakistan’s census, though, now estimates its Hindu population at just 1.6 percent- suggesting some level of sustained migration. Pakistan’s Hindu population in 1947 was around 22 percent-though that figure can be misleading, because Bangladesh was home to most of it. Precisely how Hindus left Pakistan in coming decades, it is hard to say. In 1951, Prime Ministers Liaqat Ali Khan and Jawaharlal Nehru signed a pact, intended to ensure equal rights to minorities on both sides of the border, and end population displacement. From before independence, however, most better-off Sindhis had begun moving their assets and families to India-leaving behind the poorest and most vulnerable. In 1949, the historian Rita Kothari records, 21 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh cadre staged an attempt to bomb government offices - a plot in which one biographer has claimed, although without much evidence, that former Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani was involved. In a bleak assessment of the period between 19, BR Ambedkar described the Sukkur riots as part of “twenty years of civil war between the Hindus and the Muslims in India, interrupted by brief intervals of armed peace”.Įven though Sindh saw no rioting that rivalled the scale of the violence in Punjab or Bengal, there was deep bitterness. Historian Hamida Khuhro, among others, has shown how the tensions were leveraged by the Muslim League and the neo-fundamentalist Jami’at-e-Ullema-e-Sindh to destabilise the government of Allahbux Sumroo-the then-chief minister, who ruled the province with united Hindu-Muslim support. Politics, like in so much communal violence, lay behind the riots. The issue escalated in violence which affected over a 100 villages, and claimed the lives of between 27 and 37 Hindus.
Local Hindus resisted the demand, arguing it would interfere with their rights to use a temple. Then, in 1938, the Manzilgah Masjid issue exploded-sparked off by Muslim demands to turn over a medieval mosque to worshippers. The communal tensions that underpin the exodus date back to the late nineteenth century, when religious revivalist movements, There were riots in the 1920s.
This exodus isn't new-and has roots in history. Kidnappings of women and forced conversion extortion and social exclusion: all are persuading ever-more refugees to leave their homeland for run-down buildings and cloth shacks held up with bamboo poles. Earlier this week, Firstpost reported the case of 480 Sindhi Hindu refugees, who had taken shelter in a Delhi neighbourhood-their visa status, and future, uncertain. Fearing a backlash from the resurgent Islamist movement, Pakistan’s government has chosen to do nothing in the face of relentless attacks on religious minorities-among them, the country’s Hindu minority.
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