In a country of Institutionalized Religious Persecution, Hindus continue to pay a heavy price by Marco Respinti Report Pakistani Hindus
An escalation
Things—they say—have become worse in the past few decades, due to a combination of factors. An institutionalized inequality reigning in the country has led to the systematic marginalization of Hindu individuals and families in society. Kidnappings and forced conversions especially of young women, the desecration of shrines, and discrimination with regard to employment opportunities are a daily burden. Hindus are largely absent in the top echelons of the government, bureaucracy, and military services. The state-run media, religious orthodoxy, and educational institutions all contribute to discrimination and prejudice towards them.
Years of radicalization of the society, an educational curriculum that breeds hatred for minorities, and a judicial system that is unwilling to protect them and often even condones the behavior of aggressors are all part of the problems. Moreover, there have been reports of police brutality directed at members of the Hindu minority. Pakistan’s national security establishment continues in fact to protect radical Islamist groups involved in violent attacks. Even if, at times, local and central political authorities publicly condemn the aggressions, they never fully expose and prosecute “thugs” and “dacoits” (interestingly, two Hindi terms for indicating criminals, which derived from local events and parlance and later entered the English vocabulary worldwide).
An old datum speaks quite loudly, since the situation hasn’t improved since. In March 2014, the All Pakistan Hindu Rights Movement conducted a survey, whose findings were shared with and made public by “The Express Tribune,” a daily Pakistani English-language newspaper and the country’s only internationally affiliated newspaper in partnership with the “International New York Times,” the global edition of “The New York Times.” The investigation revealed that out of 428 Hindu temples that existed in what is now Pakistan before the 1947 Partition of India (that originated Pakistan), only around 20 survived. The rest had been converted to other uses (stores, restaurants, government offices, and schools) after 1990. Those remaining are often neglected by the Evacuee Trust Property Board, a government department established in 1960 to administer properties left by Hindus and Sikhs who migrated to India after the Partition and places of worship belonging to those groups in Pakistan.
Fake Charges and Devastations of Temples
The impressive succession of events that my interlocutors recall may serve as a litmus test to prove the incandescence of the situation. The Hindu community in Lahore hasn’t in fact forgotten the day when, in late May 2006, a temple dedicated to the god Sri Krishna was destroyed to pave the way for the construction of a multi-stored commercial building owned by an influential local jeweler. When a photographer from “Dawn” (Pakistan’s newspaper of records and the most important English-language daily in the country) tried to cover the incident, he was accosted by the henchmen of the property developer, who denied that a Hindu temple previously existed on that site. “Leave this place,” they told him. “This is private property. We have invested millions of rupees.”
Stuck in the memory of the suffering is also the attack of July 2010 perpetrated by 150 residents of the Murad Memon Goth neighborhood in the Malir district of Karachi against some 60 Hindus. A minority of the local population, those Hindus were under the menace of ethnic cleansing after a Hindu youth drank from a water tap near an Islamic Mosque. About seven people were injured. 400 Hindu families feared they had soon to leave the area.
Again, on March 15, 2014, a crowd of Sunni Muslim fanatics burnt a Hindu temple in Larkana, in the Sindh Province, and the annexed “dharamshala”. Also spelled “dharamsala,” this is a Hindi word derived from Sanskrit literally meaning “house of dharma” (“dharma,” translatable here as “religion” or “religious duty,” plus “shālā” equivalent to “abode”) or “house of rest” and indicates the facility that charitably welcomes pilgrims arriving from afar to temples for praying, generally located within or close to the premises of the temple itself. In the Pakistani Sindh Province they are quite common, due to its sizeable Hindu population. (The town of Dharamshala in the state of Himachal Pradesh, India, hosting the Tibetan Government-in-exile and the residence of the Dalai Lama in its suburb McLeod Ganj, derives its name from the local settlements of pilgrims that later became permanent). The reason of the aggression was an alleged accusation of blasphemy, but most of the times these charges are totally fabricated or misinterpreted.
Top-level Complicities and Forced Conversions
On December 30, 2020, another serious attack was carried on in the Teri village of the Karak District of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. The samadhi, or burial shrine, of Shri Paramhans Swami Advaitanand Ji Maharaj (1846–1919), a revered Hindu saint, as well as the Krishna Dwara temple were burned by a mob of 1,500 people, incited and led by a local Islamic cleric. As reported by the India-based information portal in English “The Wire,” “[a]ccording to Kheal Das Kohistan, a member of National Assembly from the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), a jirga (traditional meeting) was held at the Governor’s House in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and all the culprits involved in the attack on Teri Temple were forgiven.”
Another form of religious persecution, particularly heinous since it deeply violates the conscience of human beings, is the series of abuses that amount to and culminate in forceful conversions. In Pakistan, this happens frequently—and just as frequently the victims are Hindus. “Bitter Winter” has often reported cases involving young girls, but the tragedy hit different type of citizens. One prominent example is the July 2021 incident which took place in the Mirpur Khas District of the Sindh Province and in the city of Mithi, the capital of the Tharparkar District of the same Province. At least 60 Hindus were compelled to publicly become Muslims.
Arrogant Relapses and Surrealistic Denials
People in Sindh are in fact a recurring target of anti-Hindu bigotry. Hindus are numerous there, violence is often exerted openly against them and sometimes aggressions reach peaks that alarm NGOs and independent observers, as it happened in July 2023. A post in X (at that times branded Twitter) by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (an independent human rights organization and one of the oldest in the country) stated it was “alarmed by reports of deteriorating law and order in the districts of Kashmore and Ghotki in Sindh, where some 30 members of the Hindu community‒including women and children‒have allegedly been held hostage by organised criminal gangs.”
Just a few weeks later, on August 4, 2021, another brutal attack was waged by a mob against the temple dedicated to the god Ganesh in the village of Bhong, in Pakistani Punjab’s Rahim Yar Khan district. As usual, the alleged cause was the charge of having desecrated a local madrasa (a school of religious studies) filed against an 8-years old Hindu boy, that was then released on bail. Statues of the deity were damaged, and the temple’s main door was burned down. But not only was the place vandalized: most of the Hindu families in the village were forced to leave. Speaking to “The Wire,” Lal Chand Malhi, a member of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf—which claims to be the largest political party of the country and one of the largest in the world—and at that time parliamentary secretary for human rights in the National Assembly, said: “No one understands the mental torture felt by the Hindus who were forced to leave their homes and now must begin their lives all over again in the same area. You can rebuild the temple, but you can’t make the fear among the Hindu community disappear.”
Once more, the Hindu community feared much on June 8, 2022, when the Shri Mari Mata Mandir—a temple dedicated to the major Hindu goddess Kali—in the Korangi neighbourhood of Karachi, was attacked and vandalized. This is not to be confused with another serious act of disrespect taking place the following year against a place of worship with the same name and dedication but located in another part of Karachi, the Soldier Bazaar, about 13 kilometers away. There, on July 15, 2023, the 150-year-old shrine Mari Mata Temple was demolished by the local authorities, with the mayor denying that the destruction happened. The dust over that temple were still not settled that the following day, July 16, another Hindu temple was attacked with rocket launchers again in the Sindh Province, with assailants indiscriminately firing upon that sacred building.
None should be oppressed for his or her religious beliefs, neither in Pakistan nor elsewhere, my interlocutors concluded. Adding that in Pakistan too many people of too many groups are considered second-class citizens and impertinently tormented, they want to speak with one voice for all the oppressed and make a plea for the persecuted Hindus.
Marco Respinti is an Italian professional journalist, member of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), author, translator, and lecturer. He has contributed and contributes to several journals and magazines both in print and online, both in Italy and abroad. Author of books and chapter in books, he has translated and/or edited works by, among others, Edmund Burke, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, J.R.R. Tolkien, Régine Pernoud and Gustave Thibon. A Senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal (a non-partisan, non-profit U.S. educational organization based in Mecosta, Michigan), he is also a founding member as well as a member of the Advisory Council of the Center for European Renewal (a non-profit, non-partisan pan-European educational organization based in The Hague, The Netherlands). A member of the Advisory Council of the European Federation for Freedom of Belief, in December 2022, the Universal Peace Federation bestowed on him, among others, the title of Ambassador of Peace. From February 2018 to December 2022, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of International Family News. He serves as Director-in-Charge of the academic publication The Journal of CESNUR and Bitter Winter: A Magazine on Religious Liberty and Human Rights.
