ONE EVENING IN THE SECOND WEEK of March last year, Larkana, in Pakistan’s Sindh province, was visited by an uncharacteristic burst of violence. It had begun with a rumour that a man, a Hindu, had been seen burning some pages of the Quran—a crime under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, for which the punishment can range from a fine to life imprisonment. Through the day, the rumour spread across the city via text messages, from one house to the next, and from one madrasa to another. By a few accounts, the news of the alleged act and perpetrator was announced over the public address systems of some mosques in the city.
By that evening, a mob wielding flaming torches had gathered in Dari Mohalla, outside the home of the person they believed had committed the offense: Sangeet Kumar, a resident of Larkana in his early forties, who was unemployed and subsisted on odd jobs such as sweeping his sister’s beauty salon, which she ran out of the same house the family lived in. Kumar, his brother and three of his six sisters sat in the main bedroom, huddled together in fear, watching the mob’s torches flicker through frosted windows. “We could hear them screaming,” Veena, one of Kumar’s older sisters, told me. “We could see the fire through the windows. We were terrified. We didn’t know what they wanted.”
After about two hours, the crowd left, and marched towards Jinnah Bagh on Royal Road, about half a kilometre away. That area is home to a significant Hindu population, as well as a revered Shiva temple—the largest of Larkana’s three Hindu shrines. Dileep Kumar, the owner of a sweets shop beside the temple who was present when the crowd gathered—one thousand strong, by his estimate—told me that he “saw young boys with the devil in their eyes.” “I had never seen these people before,” he said. “Larkana has never been this violent. Can you imagine one thousand people on this small street?”
The frenzied mob surrounded the temple, still brandishing torches, and shouted slogans against the Hindu community. By this time, the police had declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew in Jinnah Bagh. A contingent of policemen arrived to try and control the situation, but despite their presence, just before midnight, the mob stormed the temple. The marauders broke into the central sanctum, where they destroyed idols of deities such as Rama, Vishnu and Hanuman. The mob then entered the adjoining dharamshala—community centre—and plundered a store on its premises before setting the building on fire.
A local police official told a Press Trust of India reporter that security personnel “had to baton charge and use teargas shells to disperse the mob.” Muslims from various secular political youth groups in the city also intervened to defend the temple and control the rampaging crowd. But by the time the violence abated, considerable damage had been done. Kalpana Devi, the chairperson of a local Hindu body, told Reuters after the incident that while the temple suffered partial damage, “our dharamshala has been gutted.”
Dileep told me he hadn’t seen such brutality in the city since December 2007, when riots had broken out, businesses had been ransacked and a train set on fire after the assassination of the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. “Do you remember that?” he said. “How much unrest there was? This was even worse.”
The Larkana incident was the first and most vicious of a spate of communal attacks that swept through Pakistan in March, most of which occurred in Sindh province. Similar assaults were carried out against temples in the towns of Madheji, Ratodero and Latifabad, and on an ashram in Verhijhap village in Tharparkar district. More recently, in November, a shrine was burnt and idols were desecrated in the district of Tando Muhammad Khan, also in Sindh.
The proliferation of such violence suggests that Sindh’s historically syncretic character is waning. While large swathes of Pakistan, including the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Balochistan and Punjab, have long been roiled by tribal conflict and terrorism, Sindh, which is home to more than 90 percent of Pakistan’s Hindu population, has remained relatively harmonious. Several religious communities—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian and other—have for years coexisted in close proximity, with beliefs and customs sometimes seeping from one group to another. Hindus here have long held a genuine respect for the Quran, and many follow Shia imams and Sufi saints alongside Hindu and Sikh gurus. The province’s Sufi shrines draw both Hindu and Muslim worshippers from across the country.
But this syncretism has gradually been eroded as relations between Pakistan’s Muslims and minorities have grown increasingly fraught. These tensions have their roots in a web of factors, which includes international geopolitics, internecine rivalries, and the historical actions of individual leaders, some of whom have encouraged Pakistan’s Islamisation in order to assert greater control over its population. Now hostility is bubbling to the surface even in once-peaceful Sindh, and threatening the welfare of the province’s large non-Muslim population.
ON A SCORCHING DAY IN JULY LAST YEAR, I arrived at Larkana’s Central Jail to meet Sangeet Kumar, who had been incarcerated there since the beginning of April. Until a week earlier, I wasn’t sure I would be permitted to meet him—the case was too high-profile, the jail’s superintendent told me, and even Kumar’s family wasn’t allowed to see him regularly. But a few days later, I received word that my request had been cleared.
After being met at the gate by a crew of policemen, I—along with a small group that had accompanied me for the sake of security—signed my name in a register and was shown into the superintendent’s office, a stuffy room with sofas frayed with age and walls yellowed by nicotine. In the corner of an upper rack of an iron shelf rested a Quran, shrouded in a decorative cloth and garlanded with wilted roses—evidently, the book had not been read in many days, perhaps only gazed at, adored and presented with offerings.
“Bring in the dewan!” the superintendent called out to his officers. The Urdu word generally refers to someone of high spiritual standing, but in upper Sindh it is a term for Hindus. “He is the only dewan in the prison,” the superintendent said to me, as if to assure me that there was no risk of them fetching the wrong man.
A few minutes later, Kumar shuffled into the room—a tall, balding man of slight build, wearing a dirty off-white shalwar-kameez. I had expected someone younger-looking, perhaps because of the sense of menace that had imbued the news reports of the Larkana violence. Kumar, who was not handcuffed, went around the room shaking hands with my companions, and exchanging traditional Sindhi courtesies. “How are you? Happy? Content? How is your health? I am well. I can’t complain.” Shown to where I was waiting, he sat opposite me and repeated some of these greetings with a smile. He had a calm air about him, and it was easy to forget that I was meeting a man who had been in prison for the last four months.
As we got talking and revisited the events that had led him here, however, Kumar grew emotional and insisted that he was being wronged. “I am an innocent man,” he said, through tears. “I have committed no sin.”
Kumar recounted his version of the events in Larkana. “It all started with my neighbour,” he said. The neighbour, a well-regarded businessman of about the same age as Kumar, disapproved of the fact that Kumar’s sisters ran a beauty salon from their rented home. The neighbour saw the women’s activities as immoral, and not in keeping with the culture of a city where, despite its relatively tolerant ethos, purdah is still widely practiced by Hindus and Muslims alike.
But, as Kumar’s sister Veena explained to me at their house, opening a salon is among the least contentious employment options for women in urban Sindh. They have few other opportunities, and, though there is no law that restricts their movement or work, women are expected—like they are in much of Pakistan—to adhere strictly to unwritten codes of conduct. “I have a master’s degree in economics,” Veena told me. “Neither of my brothers have jobs, and our parents died some time ago. What else am I supposed to do?” A salon, where women could meet freely, presented itself as a safe option.
The neighbour’s behaviour irked Kumar. “Every day he would stare at my sisters and their clients coming in and out of the house,” he said. At first, Kumar ignored the neighbour’s intrusive gaze, but when it persisted and started to make his sisters uncomfortable, he decided to do something. “I confronted him on at least two or three occasions and asked him to stop bothering them. We got into several verbal fights.” During one of these, Kumar recounted, the neighbour said to him, “Stay in your place. You and your sisters are here on rent, we are permanent residents. If you keep talking to me like this I will make an example of you.”
Their altercations led the neighbour to plot retribution, Kumar said. By his account, on the morning of 13 March, after seeing Kumar burn his trash outside his house—a standard practice in Pakistan, where garbage disposal services are virtually non-existent—the neighbour began to spread a claim that Kumar had desecrated the Quran. According to police officials I spoke to, the neighbour made this accusation in text messages to friends and acquaintances, and to officials of a nearby seminary.
To this day, Kumar denies the allegations emphatically. “My sister does ladies’ haircuts, so I collected the hair from the floor, put it in a cardboard box, took it outside and burnt it,” he said. “I would never burn a verse of the Quran. It is god’s word.”
After the mob gathered outside Kumar’s house, police arrived and slipped him out undetected in a police uniform. But this was far from the end of his troubles. Kumar recounted that he was blindfolded and taken to another location, where he was interrogated without a lawyer, intimidated and physically abused. “They beat my legs,” he told me. “And for two weeks, they took me from one place to another. I was blindfolded every time so I had no idea where I was going.” Kumar said that on one such occasion, he was taken to “a room of mullahs, all sitting around me in a semi-circle … They told me to speak the truth. I pointed to the Quran in the room and I said to them”—he pointed at the Quran on the superintendent’s shelf—“up there is the Quran and I am below it.”
On 3 April, Kumar’s family was finally informed of his whereabouts. He was being held in Larkana Central Jail. Despite his denials of wrongdoing, the police had charged him with desecrating the Quran. As of the end of December, Kumar remained in the prison awaiting trial, and facing the grim prospect of life behind bars.
THE LAW UNDER WHICH KUMAR IS CHARGED is one of several in the Pakistan Penal Code that deal with offences against religion. These laws have their origin in the penal code introduced on the subcontinent by the British in 1860, which sought to protect the sentiments of different communities without singling out any specific religion. Pakistan shares with India Section 295A, which was recently invoked to suppress books such as Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History.
Pakistan inherited these British laws in 1947, but in the 1980s, under the rule of General Zia ul-Haq, they were expanded to cover a range of offences considered specifically offensive to Islam—such as desecrating the Quran or making derogatory statements against Islamic religious figures. The possible penalties were also made harsher: while the maximum punishment under the old laws was ten years of incarceration, the new laws had provisions for life imprisonment and even execution. (No one has yet been put to death by the state for a crime under these statutes.)
Along with the expansion of the blasphemy laws, the frequency of their application also shot up. Though estimates vary, most research suggests that fewer than fifteen cases were registered under the legislation in question between 1860, when the relevant section of the penal code was first introduced, and 1986. Estimates for the number of relevant cases registered in the decades since range from just over two hundred to over a thousand.
While the laws themselves are harsh, the greater risk to anyone suspected of blasphemy is from those who take the law into their own hands. All those who have been accused and acquitted of blasphemy have either left the country or gone into hiding because of the threat from vigilante groups. The writer and researcher Muhammad Nafees claims in a 2011 paper that at least fifty-one people have been murdered—or died in jail—in Pakistan since 1992 for alleged acts of blasphemy. Recent victims include the brothers Rashid and Sajjad Emmanuel, who were murdered in a Faisalabad sessions court in 2010, and Shahbaz Bhatti, the country’s minister for minorities affairs, who was gunned down in 2011.
As a result, prison officials are often cautious to protect inmates accused of offending Islam; but the measures they resort to can be brutal. The superintendent of Larkana Central Jail told me that Kumar had been kept in solitary confinement despite his pleas for some company. “He is the only dewan here and the other prisoners know what he is accused of,” the superintendent said. “We keep him in solitary confinement for his safety.”
ON 11 AUGUST 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah addressed the constituent assembly of Pakistan at its inaugural session. The subcontinent was a few days from the end of British rule, and also from the brutality of Partition, which, by some estimates, resulted in more than a million deaths, and the displacement of millions. Jinnah was a key proponent of the plan to carve national boundaries along religious lines. But in his address to the assembly, he presented a vision of a country in which all religions were equal, and in which “Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.
“You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques,” Jinnah said that day. “You may belong to any religion caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the fundamental principal that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one state.”
For a 2013 story for the BBC, the journalist Shahzeb Jillani attempted to locate an audio recording of the speech made by engineers from All India Radio. Jinnah’s words “didn’t go down well with the powerful and ambitious religious ideologues around him at the time, who then made sure the speech was virtually blacked out in the next day’s newspapers,” Jillani wrote. His efforts to trace the recording, by any measure a vital historical source, proved fruitless. (India, too, seemingly prefers to avoid this aspect of Jinnah. In 2005, the Bharatiya Janata Party leader LK Advani faced widespread criticism from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh after he praised Jinnah’s constituent assembly speech and described the Pakistani statesman as “secular.”)
Whatever Jinnah’s intentions with his speech, Hindus in Pakistan, like Muslims in India, feared for their lives at Partition, and fled in vast numbers. According to research on Karachi by the academic Tanweer Fazal, between 1941 and 1951, when the city’s population grew from 365,300 to 1,006,400, its percentage of Muslim residents increased from 42 percent to 96.1 percent, while its percentage of Hindus dropped from 47.6 percent to less than 1 percent. Similar proportions of Hindus left cities across Sindh despite the region’s tolerant history, and also across Pakistan. Today, many predominantly Muslim areas in Karachi still have street names—such as Gurumandir Chowrangi, Shivram Dewan Mal Road and Haridas Lalji Road—and both abandoned and functioning temples, that serve as reminders of the lost Hindu population.
Those Hindus who remained in Pakistan have faced considerable discrimination from local society and the state, as have the country’s other minorities. This was particularly severe under General Zia, who barred minorities from voting for or contesting any general seats; they were only represented through special seats reserved for them. The holders of these reserved seats have never been true representatives of Pakistan’s minority populations, since these positions are filled not through popular voting but through nomination by political parties in the national assembly.
The exclusion of minorities is exacerbated by an education system that is increasingly dominated by religious institutions. The economist Salman Asim estimates in a paper that Sindh has 47,000 primary, middle and elementary schools, giving the province “one of the densest public schooling systems in the world.” However, Asim notes, only five thousand of these are functional at even the most basic level, “with two or more teachers and access to the four basic facilities”—toilets, drinking water, electricity and boundary walls. Meanwhile, the Sindh home ministry estimates, the province has 12,545 madrasas, of which around 65 percent opened in the years after the terrorist attacks of September 2011, when both the province and the country saw a sharp rise in violent religious fundamentalism. As a result, in many parts of rural Sindh, Hindus and other minorities have to choose between going uneducated or joining madrasas.
Even in the better public and private schools in Sindh, Islamic studies are compulsory for Muslim and non-Muslim students alike. “I had to study Islamiat in school,” Kalpana Devi, a lawyer and Hindu rights activist, told me, “and today my daughter must also study Islamiat.” I remember that curriculum from my own schooling in Karachi: Muslims are glorified, and Hindus and other minorities portrayed as ignorant and intolerant. “There is a lot of discrimination in education,” Devi said. “The government should teach us about Gautama Buddha, Guru Nanak, all of these people who are not Muslim but preached peace. The children need to have a positive view of themselves.”
This is the backdrop to the rise in anti-minority violence. The phenomenon began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when both Pakistan and India went through a period of religious conservatism, paranoia and exclusionary politics. Communal tensions in each country infected the other. After the Babri Masjid was destroyed in Ayodhya, militant Islamic groups in Pakistan sent people out to ransack and destroy Hindu and Jain temples. Thirty such sites, many of them architectural and historical landmarks dating back centuries, were damaged. Ancient Jain temples in Tharparkar had their priceless frescoes desecrated, and several of Lahore’s many abandoned temples were brought down.
The environment grew even more toxic after September 2011. Attacks on churches became more frequent, particularly in Karachi and the province of Punjab. Many in Sindh, Hindus and Muslims alike, fear that the unrest has now arrived at their doorsteps.
ALTHOUGH THE GROWING ANIMOSITY against Sindh’s Hindu community has deep historical, religious and political roots, it is also fuelled by material considerations. Hindus own some of the most valuable inner-city property in Sindh, in places such as Hyderabad, Sukkur and Shikarpur. This includes old houses still inhabited by wealthy families and temples that occupy large plots in city centres, as well as large suburban properties inhabited by poorer communities.
The desire to control these valuable tracts of land has spurred land-grabbing. This greed is further propelled by the fact that, despite being racked by unrest, Pakistan is seen as an attractive investment destination for some businesses, such as internet technology companies. Karachi, in particular, has a lucrative real-estate market—a Dawn report described the city as a “goldmine for land ‘developers.’”
Hindu residents sometimes come in the way of highly profitable new property developments. A young community leader from a Hindu ghetto of four hundred homes in the Hyderabad suburb of Latifabad told me about an attack at the end of March last year, soon after the events at Larkana. (He asked to remain anonymous for the sake of safety.) The attack’s aim, the young man said, was to scare the community off their land.
In the early hours of 28 March, two men entered a temple compound inside the ghetto, where hundreds had gathered for the day’s first puja. “Their intention was to attack our main Kali temple,” the young man said. But the conspirators were surprised by the large number of worshippers present. They moved away from the main shrine towards the compound’s entrance, and stopped at a smaller Hanuman temple, where they pretended to perform a puja. After praying for two minutes, “they quickly doused the Hanuman statue in kerosene,” the young man said. Before anyone could stop them, they set it on fire, and then fled in a car parked nearby. “It all happened in a matter of minutes,” he added.
According to the young man, this was just one incident against a backdrop of intimidation meant to push Hindus away. A Hindu graveyard and some Hindu homes in Hyderabad had already been occupied by people with powerful political connections, he alleged. “They take advantage of us because we are poor,” he said. “We do not ask anyone for anything. We simply want to live in peace.”
Perhaps the most prominent conflict over land in Sindh is that surrounding the Sri Ratneshwar Mahadev temple, the second-largest Hindu temple in Karachi, and one of its most frequented. Its location, on the posh colonial-era waterfront of Clifton Promenade, makes it attractive and accessible to devotees, several thousand of who visit on any given Monday, the main puja day of the temple’s deity, Shiva.
The temple is inside a natural underground cave, and its walls and chambers have been built under an unaltered roof of stone. In March 2014, Bahria Town, one of Pakistan’s largest real-estate developers, began construction nearby on two underpasses and a flyover. The work was part of a colossal project the company has undertaken in the area—the Bahria Icon tower, which, at 270 metres, is slated to be the tallest building in Pakistan. Since construction began, chunks of the cave roof have broken off, and cracks have appeared in the temple’s walls. The activists Shyam Shahani, Krishnchand Perwani and Ravi Dawani, along with other Clifton residents, petitioned the Sindh High Court to stop the construction. The court ordered a stay on the work in April.
After the stay order, Bahria Town left the construction site as it was, without filling up the ditches it had already dug. One of Karachi’s few public spaces was reduced to an open pit, traffic in the area was disrupted, and accessing the temple became difficult—once an easy hundred-metre stretch from the main road, getting to it now required a detour around the building site and some roadblocks. The stay remained in place until October, when another bench of the same court ordered that work resume. Bahria Town has now replaced with porous cement a layer of hard rock that lay above cave, which prevented the seepage of rainwater and sewage. Activists are worried about possible flooding of the temple during heavy rains. With damage suspected to the temple’s foundations too, they also fear that the entire structure might collapse.
Though the Hindu community is distressed by these dangers, activists have found it difficult to muster sustained political support for the campaign against the company. One reason for this, according to Shahani, is the fact that Hindus remain politically unrepresented. “There are no Hindus elected to their posts,” he said, “they are there to fill a quota.” Shahani’s late father, Prem Kevalram Shahani, spent much of the 1980s campaigning against the reserved-seats system. He demanded that Hindus be allowed to vote for representatives for both reserved and general seats. His son continues this battle.
Many of Pakistan’s Hindus are now deeply disenchanted and considering emigration, in many cases to India. “Give me a ticket and I will leave with the clothes on my back,” said the community leader I met in Latifabad. Indeed, Pakistan has, over the years, seen a steady outward trickle of its Hindu population. A May 2014 report in Dawn estimated that as many as five thousand people are migrating to India every year.
Making that move, however, is not easy. A February 2014 report by Al Jazeera highlighted the procedural hurdles Pakistani Hindu migrants encounter when they cross the border to escape violence, extortion or forced conversion. The Indian government is reluctant to grant refugee status to Pakistani citizens, even those who qualify under the UNCHR’s 1951 Refugee Convention by proving that they face persecution in their home country on grounds of their religion. As per Indian regulations, the report explains, Pakistani Hindus who want to apply for Indian citizenship have to wait seven years before they can do so. Those interviewed for the report recounted facing social stigma and discrimination at educational institutes and potential workplaces as soon as Indians learnt of their nationality. Many people I spoke to with relatives and friends who had gone to India reported that the migrants were unable to find jobs there—and if they did, they did not earn as much as they could in Pakistan. Settling in permanently is almost unthinkable for these migrants, since Pakistanis are not permitted to own property in India.
One subject in the Al Jazeera report summed up the paradox these migrants face. “My life was dark in Pakistan where I had to hide my identity as a Hindu,” he said. “And now in India, my life continues to be in darkness as I have to hide I am Pakistani.”
But many Pakistani Hindus do not even consider leaving, not because they fear discrimination abroad but because the country is their home. “We must show Sindhis in India that we can live happily in Pakistan,” the activist Kalpana Devi told me. “We are not the only community facing problems. We want the same rights other Pakistanis also fight for.” Another activist, Sanjay Gangwani, echoed the sentiment. “We didn’t leave in 1947 because this is our home,” he said. “We went through a lot then and still didn’t migrate. Why should we go now?”
I WENT BACK TO LARKANA IN AUGUST, around five months after the violence there. I had grown attached to the place since I first visited it, at the age of thirteen. On nearly every return to Larkana—which, along with Karachi, is one of the two cities I call home—I made it a point to stop by the Shiva temple. As a teenager, I found it a much-needed source of solace in a country racked with anxieties. But on the Friday evening when I visited this time, I saw something on the temple’s main door that hadn’t been there earlier, before the attack: a painted sign, in Sindhi and English, that read “Only For Hindus.”
The March attack had traumatised the city’s Hindu community, and I half-expected the temple to be empty, perhaps even closed. To my surprise, it was full—Friday is an important day for puja at the temple. Rickshaws full of people shuttled between the temple and a nearby canal, where rice, flowers, fruits, and the plastic bags they were in, were all offered to the river god Jhulelal.
As dusk fell, the shops that lined the road to the temple began to bustle with visitors. Hoopoe and myna birds crowded the sky as they made their way to their nests. The sound of a conch rose through the air, soft at first and then louder, building to a crescendo; from further away, faint but audible, came the sound of the evening azan over a mosque’s loudspeaker. Men and women passed into the temple through an ornate wooden doorway, above which was a Ganesha carved in relief. The dharamshala next door filled with families preparing for weddings in its open courtyard.
As the night wore on, the bhajans grew louder, filling me with the same calm that I had kept returning for over so many years. Around midnight, as I left, my eye fell on another sign, in a corner of the compound not far from the entrance. In Urdu letters painted bright red, it said, simply, “Sab ka malik aik hai”—We are all united by one creator.
Correction: The print version of this article incorrectly dated the terrorist attacks of September 2001 to September 2011. The Caravan regrets the error.