Yesterday, in a private email to my siblings, I lamented the treatment of Hindus in Pakistan. This fit of regretful pique was brought on by reading the news of one 22-year-old Jagdeesh Kumar who was beaten to death in a factory in Karachi by his coworkers for allegedly blaspheming the prophet Muhammad. You can read the whole sad, but all-too-common, story here. So it is timely that Ali Eteraz sent his excellent article to me today about Hindus in Pakistan. This is from The Guardian:
The cultural and institutional marginalisation of Hindus in Pakistan is a travesty of human dignity and freedom.
Hindus in Pakistan have suffered grievously since the founding of the nation in 1947. Recently, in the southern province of Sindh, a Hindu man was accused of blasphemy and beaten to death by his co-workers. This comes at the heels of the abduction and dismemberment of a Hindu engineer.
A little while earlier, the military removed 70 Hindu families from lands where they had been living since the 19th century. To this day the temples that Pakistanis destroyed in 1992 in response to the destruction of the Babri mosque in India have not been restored.
Pakistan, according to many accounts, was founded as a way to protect the rights and existence of the minority Muslim population of Colonial India in the face of the larger Hindu majority. Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, is reported to have said in 1947: “In due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims – not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual- but in a political sense as citizens of one state.” It is therefore a travesty of Pakistan’s own founding principles that its Hindus – and not to exclude Christians and Ahmadis – have suffered so grossly.
There are two levels of prejudice in Pakistan with respect to Hindus – the cultural and the legal.
While it is difficult to say which one is more pernicious, cultural prejudice is certainly more difficult to uproot because it is perpetuated by religious supremacism, nationalism, stories, myth, lies, families, media, schooling and bigotry.
More here.