By the time her visa arrived, Bharti had given birth to a baby boy in Pakistan’s Sindh province. There was no time to apply for his passport. The visa for India, for a holy dip at the Kumbh in Allahabad, had been hard to come by. Not everyone had been as lucky. Many others who had applied did not get one. Moreover, her family could pay for the visa only because their Hindu neighbours had collected money and given it to them. She knew they would get no second chance. So Bharti took her newborn in her arms, and, together with her labourer husband and six other children, reached the last checkpost in Pakistan at its border with India’s Rajasthan.
“Where is the baby’s passport?” demanded the guard at the border. “He was just born. Please have mercy on me, let him go,” Bharti pleaded. But the baby was snatched from her arms and given to her husband’s brother who had not got a visa. Tormented by pangs of separation, Bharti crossed the border. The group of 479 Hindus she was with attended the Kumbh and then made its way to Delhi’s Bijwasan area, where they have been living in a couple of buildings. Bharti spends the day looking at a picture of her baby taken on a relative’s cellphone. “I am writhing like a fish without water,” she says. Outside her room, volunteers of a Hindu group are distributing foodgrain. But she has no appetite, she says.
There are more than 2.5 million Hindus in Pakistan, most of them poor Dalits who live in Sindh. Life has always been hard for Hindus in that country ever since its formation. But things turned worse for them after the Babri Masjid demolition of 1992. In the past few years, thousands have been reported killed, and hundreds of women abducted, raped or forcibly married off. There are also reports of forced conversions to Islam. Things are so bad that many feel that it is impossible for them to live in Pakistan any longer.
In March last year, Indian middle-order batsman Virat Kohli scored an unbeaten 183 against Pakistan in the Asia Cup. The same night, three Hindu girls of the Kolhi tribe were abducted from a village in Sindh. “We make sure that our daughters get married by the age of 10-11. But even that does not guarantee their safety,” says Nehru Lal, one of the refugees from Hyderabad. Among those who managed to flee this time is 36-year-old Lakshman, a fruit seller from Sindh. His six-month-old granddaughter died of an unknown illness soon after they reached Delhi. But he himself is lucky to be alive. About two years ago, he was abducted by Muslim extremists who wanted him to convert. When he refused, they abducted him one night and kept him chained for three months. “They would slit my wrist every day, asking me to convert,” he says, “But I refused.” Then one night, he got a chance to escape. But his abductors chased him and stabbed him in the back. They left him on the border of Balochistan, assuming him dead.
The recent phase of persecution of minorities in Pakistan has been attributed to rising religious extremism, some of which stems from the State-sanctioned school curriculum. According to Pakistani historians, the tilt towards religious studies began in 1971 under the leadership of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and was encouraged by the military regime of General Zia ul-Haq. A Los Angeles Times report says that a study of the country’s public school curriculum and textbooks by 29 Pakistani academics in 2002 concluded that their ‘textbooks tell lies, create hatred, inculcate militancy and much more.’ In 2007, two Pakistani students from America’s Middlebury College conducted a review of State-approved school textbooks and found that revisionism in Social Sciences had reached dangerous levels. While passages on the festivals of Hindus and other minorities had been removed, menacing ideas like ‘Pakistan is for Muslims alone’ or ‘Muslims are urged to fight Jihad against infidels’ had been introduced. What is taught at thousands of madrassas across Pakistan is presumably even more intolerant. Such invective manifests itself in the brutalisation of its minorities...
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