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[Art Deco]

Religion under siege: Long-suffering Pakistani Hindus face forced
conversions, attacks

Published November 08, 2012

Associated Press

KARACHI, Pakistan –  They came after dusk and chanted into the night sky
"Kill the Hindus, kill the children of the Hindus," as they smashed
religious icons, ripped golden bangles off women's arms and flashed
pistols. It wasn't the first time that the Hindu temple on the outskirts of
Pakistan's largest city was attacked, and residents here fear it will not
be the last.

"People don't consider us as equal citizens. They beat us whenever they
want," said Mol Chand, one of the teenage boys gathered at the temple. "We
have no place to worship now."

It was the second time the Sri Krishna Ram temple has been attacked, and
this time the mob didn't even bother to disguise their faces. The small
temple, surrounded by a stone wall, is a tiny religious outpost in a dusty,
hardscrabble neighborhood so far on the outskirts of the city that a sign
on the main road wishes people leaving Karachi a good journey.

Local Muslim residents blamed people from a nearby ethnic Pashtun village
for the attack, which took place in late September on the* Day of Love for
the Prophet*, a national holiday declared by the government in response to
an anti-Islam film made in the U.S. No one was seriously injured in the
attack.

It was the latest in a rising tide of violence and discrimination against
Hindus in this 95 percent Muslim country, where Islamic extremism is
growing. Pakistan's Hindu community says it faces forced conversions of
Hindu girls to Islam, a lack of legal recognition for their marriages,
discrimination in services and physical abuse when they venture into the
streets.

The story of the Hindu population in Pakistan is one of long decline.
During partition in 1947, the violent separation of Pakistan and India into
separate countries, hundreds of thousands of Hindus opted to migrate to
India where Hinduism is the dominant religion. Those that remained and
their descendants now make up a tiny fraction of Pakistan's estimated 190
million citizens, and are mostly concentrated in Sindh province in the
southern part of the country.

Signs of their former stature abound in Karachi, the capital of Sindh. At
the 150-year-old Swami Narayan Temple along one of the city's main roads,
thousands of Hindus gather during the year to celebrate major religious
holidays. Hindus at the 200-year-old Laxmi Narain Temple scatter the ashes
of their cremated loved ones in the waters of an inlet from the Arabian
Ocean.

But there are also signs of how far the community has fallen. Residents in
a city hungry for land have begun to build over Hindu cemeteries, the
community's leaders say. Hindus helped build Karachi's port decades ago,
but none work there now.

Estimates of the size of the Hindu population in Pakistan are all over the
map — from 2.5 million or 10 million in Sindh province alone to 7 million
across the country — a reflection of the fact that the country hasn't had a
census since 1998.

It isn't just Hindus who are facing problems. Other minorities like
Christians, the mystical Muslim branch of Sufis and the Ahmadi sect have
found themselves under attack in Pakistan, where the rise of Muslim
fundamentalists has sometimes unleashed a violent opposition against those
who don't follow their strict religious tenets.

The discrimination has prompted some Hindus to leave for India, activists
warn, though the extent is not known. Around 3,000 Hindus left this year,
part of a migration that began four years ago, sparked by discrimination
and a general rise in crime in Sindh, said DM Maharaj, who heads an
organization to help Hindus called Pakistan Hindu Sabha.

He said he recently talked to a group of Hindus preparing to move to India
from rural Sindh, complaining that they can't eat in Muslim restaurants or
that Muslim officials turned them down for farming loans. Even during
recent floods, they said Muslims did not want them staying in the same
refugee camps.

Other Hindu figures such as provincial assembly member Pitamber Sewami deny
there's a migration at all, in a reflection of how sensitive the issue is.
Earlier this year, there were a string of reports in Pakistani media about
Hindus leaving the country, sparking a flurry of promises by Pakistani
officials to investigate.

In India, a Home office official said the Indian government noticed an
upward trend of people coming from Pakistan but called reports of
Pakistanis fleeing to India "exaggerated." He said he does not have exact
figures on how many Pakistani Hindus have stayed in India after entering
the country on tourist visas. The official spoke on condition of anonymity
due to the sensitivity of the topic.

There's more of a consensus of the seriousness of the problem of forced
conversion of Hindus.

Zohra Yusuf, the president of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says
the pattern goes like this: A Hindu girl goes missing and then resurfaces
days or weeks later married to a Muslim boy. During court hearings to
determine whether the conversion was voluntary, students from nearby
Islamic schools called madrassas often flood the room, trying to intimidate
the judges by chanting demands that the conversion be confirmed.

Maharaj says he's tried to intervene in roughly 100 cases of forced
conversions but has only succeeded in returning a girl safely back to her
family once. If a girl decides to renounce Islam and return to Hinduism,
she could be signing a death warrant for herself and her family even if her
conversion was forced.

The Hindu community has also been hurt by a lack of unity within its ranks.
Hindu society within Pakistan and elsewhere has historically been divided
by caste, a system of social stratification in which the lower castes are
often seen as inferior. Members of the lower castes in Pakistan say it
wasn't until two girls from a high-caste family were forcibly converted
this year that high-caste Hindus took the issue seriously, although it's
been happening for years.

"We always fight our war ourselves," said Bholoo Devjee, a Hindu activist
from Karachi, speaking about the lower castes.

In recent months the government has begun to take the concerns of the Hindu
community more seriously. In Sindh province, legislators proposed a law to
prevent forced conversions in part by implementing a waiting period before
a marriage between a Hindu and a Muslim can go forward, and there's
discussion about proposing such a law on the national level as well.

In the case of the Sri Krishna Ram temple, law enforcement authorities
opened a blasphemy case against the people who rampaged through the
building. But residents here are skeptical that these developments signify
any long-term improvement in their plight. Weeks after the incident no
arrests have been made, and the Hindus complain that no high-ranking Hindu
officials have come to visit them or help them get compensation.

Sunda Maharaj, the spiritual leader at the temple, which was first attacked
in January 2011, said he and the other residents do not want to move to
India. "We are Pakistani," he said.

But he would like more help from the government, specifically a checkpoint
to stop people from getting close to the temple and money for the Hindus to
buy weapons.

"Next time anyone comes we can kill them or die defending our temple," he
said.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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