<h1 id="article-title" class="entry-title">Religion under siege: Long-suffering Pakistani Hindus face forced conversions, attacks</h1>
<div class="article-info">
<p class="published updated dtstamp">Published November 08, 2012<span class="value-title" title="2012-11-08T03:40:35.000-0500"></span></p><p class="source-org vcard"><span class="org fn">Associated Press</span><br></p>
</div><p><span class="dateline">KARACHI, Pakistan – </span>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.</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Local Muslim residents blamed people from a nearby
ethnic Pashtun village for the attack, which took place in late
September on the<span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)"><font size="6"><b> Day of Love for the Prophet</b></font></span>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>There's more of a consensus of the seriousness of the problem of forced conversion of Hindus.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"We always fight our war ourselves," said Bholoo Devjee, a Hindu activist from Karachi, speaking about the lower castes.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"Next time anyone comes we can kill them or die defending our temple," he said.</p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br>
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