by Meena Menon
‘My kids don’t have a future’
‘My younger son was beaten up one day. He wanted to complain to the police. I told him to forget it. My son is eighteen, they were playing snooker and some kids from the madrasa near my house told him he was a Qadiyani [Ahmadi], why are you playing here? They thrashed him and his friends badly. His friends said your father is a journalist, call the police. I told my son to go home and drink water.’
The identity of this person has to be kept anonymous. It was difficult to get him to tell his story and his eyes were gleaming with tears. I had to wait for occasions to meet him and it was quite by accident that we met twice and he could complete his story. It’s not easy to get Ahmadis to speak up, most of them are afraid and tend to keep a low profile so that they are not killed. After the incident, Hameed (name changed) decided to move house. The threats to his son continued and he was tense all the time. He has two sons and a daughter. Every time his phone rang, he would expect some intimidation. He sold his house—it was a house he had built, and he had saved every paisa over the years to build it. He wanted to leave the country, his wife, too, was keen on leaving but he didn’t have that kind of money. He says, ‘I want my children to live in a free society. My son works so hard, he does his MBA.’ He himself holds two jobs, starting the day at 7 a.m. and getting home very late. At fifty-six, he is tired of juggling jobs, worrying about his safety and that of his children. ‘I am tired now and my kids don’t have a future. It’s difficult for my son to get a job since the fact he is an Ahmadi is in his CNIC [Computerized National Identity Card].22 You also have to sign a declaration that as a Qadiyani you cannot be taught the Koran. While Musharraf gave the Ahmadis the right to vote, we can only vote for the minorities. We don’t accept this discrimination, we are not non-Muslims. I keep a low profile and I use my contacts for my protection.’ But he knows that no one really can protect him.
I met Ahmad Raza Kasuri who was defence lawyer for General Musharraf during his treason trial, and asked him about the Ahmadi question. He fully endorsed it, he said, and was part of the National Assembly when the amendment outlawing Ahmadis as Muslims was passed unanimously. There are many who condemn it, and the two articles I have quoted—one by Adil Najam and one by the late Murtaza Razvi—are examples of this public dissent on the plight of the community. But the Constitution has not been amended in their favour despite cases in court.
The Hindu question
‘Of all minority groups, Pakistani Hindus have borne the brunt of stigmatization as a consequence of biased school textbooks that paint them as evil, anti-state and untrustworthy. In 2015, there were numerous incidents of forced conversions, rape and attacks on places of worship targeting members of the Hindu community.’23 There has been no let-up in the attacks on minorities, and the Jinnah Institute documented 351 incidents of violence in the period 2012–15. When I came back from Pakistan in May 2013, I read some comments on my farewell article that I didn’t mention the oppression of the Hindus. I got long emails on what was going on in the Sindh province and how Hindus were being tortured and fleeing the country. If it was Pakistan, then it must be the Hindus who were oppressed. First of all, I couldn’t travel anywhere, much less to Sindh, and the people from the Hindu community I met in Islamabad, some of them were from Rawalpindi, did not tell me that they were oppressed or that they wanted to leave the country. However, places in Sindh and Punjab were showing an increase in the number of cases of human rights violations against Hindus, causing an exodus. There were pressing issues for the Hindus in and around the capital. They were agitating for a temple in Islamabad; the only one was in Saidpur, part of an old gurdwara, and it did not have an idol. They also wanted a crematorium in Islamabad since there was only one in Rawalpindi. Some of them were leaders of the community in successful businesses and would present their demands to top politicians. There was also a group of shopkeepers from Rajasthan who had migrated from the Thar many years ago, who had a row of shops selling woollen clothes and handicrafts in a premier shopping area. They were happy to meet an Indian and even offered to host ‘a vegetarian lunch’ for me. They didn’t speak of oppression and torture, and seemed very well-to-do. One of them had built a new house and was having a celebration of sorts.
No one can deny there are grave human rights violations against Hindus who are under threat in some areas, and they are severely under-represented in the National Assembly (like all minorities), and Ramesh Kumar Vankwani is the only one from the ruling PMLN. The Pakistan Hindu Council does regularly take up issues of temples under threat and girls being married off or converted, and Vankwani himself faced death threats during the local bodies’ elections.
I met the small Hindu community in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, which came to show solidarity with the Christians after the Peshawar suicide bombing on the All Saints Church in September 2013. There are about 115 families in Islamabad and about 400 families in Rawalpindi, and they are all original residents of the area and have not come as migrants from India. Security is not on their agenda yet and they perceive little threat in the twin cities. But there is unhappiness over the list of demands which the government has not fulfilled.
Pandit Channalal from Rawalpindi said that while the Hindu community was not targeted in any way, the government had not agreed to any of its demands for a temple, a community centre and a crematorium in the capital. While Hindus elsewhere in the country, especially in Sindh, are under threat and there have been ‘forced conversions’, the community is highly integrated in Rawalpindi, the members said. Rawalpindi has a Krishna temple but in Islamabad, despite repeated requests, the government was not taking a decision on handing over a temple near the Rawal Lake to the community for active worship. Professor A.K. Tanwani had even met the former President and prime minister, but their demands were pending. ‘We live on hope that it will happen one day,’ he said.
In fact, when I was there, the Pakistan Hindu Council did take up the issue of the rising cases of kidnapping of Hindu girls and forced conversion and marriage. There was the case of Rinkle Kumari which went right up to the Supreme Court, though the apex court left it to the girls to decide their future. Sometimes the media and activists do ensure that the girls are restored to their families, as was the case with Sapna Rani from Peshawar. The Sindh government had set up a committee to examine the forced marriage of Hindu girls, and there were reports that there were twenty such cases every month, which I did write on. After coming back, I get regular updates from the council on the many kidnapped girls and how it was difficult for them to return to their families. Vankwani remains, along with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the most vociferous and active in highlighting crimes against Hindus.
The Hindus who come to India don’t want to go back to a situation where their identity is being almost erased. There were only two instances when I wrote about Hindu institutions: one, when a dharamshala in Larkana in Sindh was attacked, and there was a huge uproar from the civil society which came together to celebrate a joint Holi as a testimony to their harmonious relations; the other incident was in Peshawar when one morning, a security guard outside one of the Hindu temples in Peshawar was shot dead. I called the local police to confirm this, but they couldn’t tell me which temple it was—there were two temples in the city. When I asked the policeman to name the temple, he could only say it was a Hindu temple. I had to leave it at that for the story I filed.
The Hindu dharamshala in Larkana was set on fire just before Holi in 2014. This time I did get specific details from the local police. There were reports of a burnt Koran outside a Hindu man’s residence and when people found out, they burnt the dharamshala. It seemed or was made to look like a quid-pro-quo crime. A room next to the dharamshala was damaged and the government stepped in to announce it would rebuild it soon. The police appointed two members from the Hindu and Muslim communities to oversee the investigation. The situation snowballed into violence in other areas of Larkana and Sindh, and there were protests an
d shops were shut, and police had to call meetings of the two communities to keep the peace. Sharif issued a statement saying it was the government’s responsibility to protect minorities.
There were elaborate temples in Karachi, some of them ancient, and the city’s development has posed a threat to some of them, but the courts have taken a stand or there have been interventions by the public. There have also been cases when ancient temples like Katasraj were restored by earnest government officials on their own initiative. But the situation can’t be too happy, and festivals in places like Rawalpindi have a muted quality, and the temples and members of the Hindu community avoid ostentatious displays. Basant, even though it wasn’t a specifically Hindu festival, was popular in Lahore, till it was banned for various reasons. And to think it was a festival for both Hindus and Muslims in possibly happier times with week-long celebrations in eighteenth-century Delhi.
The HRCP intervened to try and save the more than 150-year-old Sri Ratneswar Mahadev Temple, which was going to be affected by some proposed underpasses and flyovers near Clifton in Karachi. The temple, which is visited by thousands of Hindu and Sikh devotees, was located in a cavern within a few metres of one of the underpasses. The HRCP wrote a letter to the chief justice of the Supreme Court saying that business interests in complicity with officials of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) had started construction of multiple flyovers and underpasses around the Clifton seafront without any prior notice. There was no environmental impact assessment (with public hearings) mandated by law, and the HRCP said the Hindu community in Sindh had been experiencing escalating human rights violations over the past few years. The Laxmi Narayan Mandir, located at Native Jetty near the Jinnah Bridge on M.A. Jinnah Road, had its access, privacy and environs severely affected a few years ago by another commercial project, Port Grand.
Art of Living
I didn’t realize that Art of Living (AOL) was popular in Pakistan till I heard about one of its centres being burnt down in Bani Gala in March 2014. I went with Shahnaz Minallah who had a lovely home, which was gutted, on the banks of the Rawal Lake. She was the co-chair of the AOL Foundation in Pakistan and only escaped because she was away for an advanced training course in Nankana. Bani Gala is where the rich have huge houses, including Imran Khan who seems to have occupied an entire cliff side. The AOL headquarters in Islamabad was protected by a flimsy bamboo gate. The two security guards were tied up and one of them had a gun held to his head by a group of people who went on to set fire to the office, the guest rooms and Minallah’s residence with petrol.
The advanced training course with an Indian teacher was to be held there which was why the guest rooms were in readiness with pristine white bedcovers. Minallah was an ardent practitioner of AOL and became a disciple of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar when he visited Pakistan in 2004. She put all her money to build the complex on her own land. The centre was formally inaugurated by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in 2012. ‘In 2004 it was sheer chance that Guruji visited us and I don’t know what drove me to follow him. We do courses mostly in three cities and from twenty-odd people the number has swelled to over eighty per training session,’ she said.
Even without any marketing or publicity, people would come for the training sessions. The small campus had a meditation hall, an amphitheatre and guest rooms, apart from Minallah’s house. She was mystified as to why the centre was a target and said that people have had the most extraordinary experiences there.
When Minallah bought the land, it was a swamp and she worked hard to make it what it is now—a serene meditation centre. Her house and all her belongings were destroyed in the fire, including all her documents and photos. I remember her standing in the middle of a blackened front room looking at bits of old photos. There had been a TV programme some days earlier where her co-chair, Naeem, was interviewed and grilled on the funding for the centre. ‘They had said it would be about the Art of Living course but instead they asked pointed questions about our funding and didn’t wait to hear our answers,’ she said. A lot of motives were imputed to the AOL centre. The arson attack came after that. ‘I have nothing to hide, I am an open book—anyone can walk in and see what we are doing,’ she said. I ran into her once after the story appeared in the paper and she said her friends asked her why she had taken an Indian there or something to that effect.
To be a Shia
When I first met a Shia journalist, he seemed nervous. We were guests at a diplomat’s house. He told me that if there is some trouble, ‘it is I who will be shot not you as an Indian and a Hindu’. That’s how much the Shias were hated. And there would be regular attacks on Shia pilgrims and on the imambargahs. I later met another Shia journalist who joked that he would always watch his back for fear of being stabbed. I realized this was not a joke. For this community, there was everything to fear and no one would help, despite brave attempts by the HRCP to highlight their situation and issue strong condemnations, or stage public protests. Over 50,000 Shias have been killed in the proxy war between Iran and Pakistan. The coffins on the road had become a symbol of defiance for the Shia Hazaras who were often bombed on their way back from pilgrimage in Iran. In January 2013, 100 of them were killed, and in protest the community sat with their coffins outside, refusing to bury them. A year later, the coffins were on the street again to protest one more bombing. I went for a protest outside the Islamabad Press Club where a handful of determined people raised their voice.
The new year of 2014 brought a sense of déjà vu to many Shia Hazaras after a bus in Mastung in Balochistan was blown up, killing over twenty pilgrims returning from Iran. Across the country there was solidarity for the protests in the freezing cold at Alamdar Road in Quetta. In Islamabad, protestors were up all night. Once a seasoned journalist asked me if the same twenty people protested against everything in Mumbai and it was regrettably true of Islamabad. Activists Rehana Hashmi of the Sisters Trust Pakistan and Tahira Abdullah were among those who sat up all night in outrage and grief. In 2013 too, Abdullah was among those who guarded the coffins for four nights of the 100 killed in Quetta. There was a helpless rage against these attacks which no protest could mitigate. I met some Hazara Shias who had fled Quetta to make their home in the capital. Even a simple act of going to buy things or sending children to school was fraught with anxiety, as Faisal (name changed), a shopkeeper from Quetta, pointed out, and it was so difficult to live with this daily threat of death. He sold his shop and came to the capital to earn a living. In Quetta the community is confined to Hazara Town and Alamdar Road. Over eleven years, the Hazaras have been reduced to a miserable condition, as one of the protestors said: ‘They are psychologically ill, socially isolated, and economically finished.’ There was no sense of security and during a major blast at Kirani Road in Quetta in 2013, a tanker full of explosives had made its way through six check posts. Even though people covered their faces in public or wore dark glasses, they were still targeted.
A young student who was injured in a bomb blast in a university bus in Quetta had to leave the city to complete his studies. ‘People target you if you are a Hazara,’ he said, their Mongoloid features making it easier for them to be identified. I met a Hazara waitress from Bamiyan in Afghanistan who was waiting to go abroad after her family’s appeal for refugee status was approved by the UNHCR. There was no way she could ever go back to her beautiful home, now ravaged by the Taliban.
To die is to sleep no more
It was his word against another’s and the courts ignored the fact that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Blasphemy laws are used conveniently against the minorities and Muslims too, to evict them or take revenge, and Mohammed Asghar, a mentally challenged man, was a victim. Initial news reports on Asghar, a sixty-nine-year-old British Pakistani who was sentenced to death for blasphemy, made no mention of the fact that he was suffering from schizophrenia. The government prosecutor in the case, Javed Gul, told me that Asghar had come to Pakistan in 2010 and he was accused of printing visiting cards in the name of Pro
phet Mohammed. Police had also seized some letters he had written where he wrote that he was the Prophet. Handwriting experts had testified in court that the letters were written by Asghar. When asked to say something in his defence, Asghar confessed that he was indeed the Holy Prophet, Gul said.
The real story is a bit different. When Asghar who lived in Edinburgh with his family, came to Rawalpindi in 2010, he was shocked to find one of the two properties he owned there occupied by a notorious land grabber. He filed a complaint against him before leaving for the Haj pilgrimage, but it was Asghar who was arrested on his return. Predictably, all the evidence, including the letters, was handed over to the police by the complainant, who had many anti-corruption cases against him. Section 295C of the PPC says: ‘Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.’ Sections 295 to 295C of the PPC are generally referred to as the ‘blasphemy code’. The punishments for offences under these provisions include death (under Section 295C), life imprisonment, imprisonment for various periods, and fine.
The trial court threw out Asghar’s legal representatives who were working with him from October 2013, and appointed a state counsel. Asghar has a long and well-diagnosed history of schizophrenia which started in 1993. His stroke resulted in him walking with a limp. Even in Edinburgh, he had been detained under the Mental Health Act, in February 2010, as he suffered from paranoid delusions, and was later admitted to the Royal Victoria Hospital. It was diagnosed that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. His defence lawyers obtained his medical records in March 2011 from the National Health Service in the UK and an affidavit from Dr Jane McLennan, the consultant psychiatrist at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Edinburgh. The judge ordered a medical examination on the basis of all the documents.