Dilip Simeon's blog

Hindu community irked by ‘forced conversions’ KARACHI: “Can you accept your daughters forcibly being married to Hindu men?” said Rinkle Kumari’s uncle Raj Kumar at a seminar titled ‘Hindus in Pakistan — issues and solutions’ held at the Karachi Press Club here on Sunday. Calling a little six-year-old girl, Jumna, onto the stage, he said that she along with her 10-year-old sister, Pooja, was also being forced to change religion if the media had not raised their case. “What do children as young as Jumna and Pooja know about Islam and their own religion for that matter that they’d want to convert? This is the height of injustice,” he said.  Jumna’s parents, mother Marju and father Soma, were also present. Soma said that they were residents of Akhtar Colony in Mirpurkhas. “We are poor people. My little girls helped supplement our income by selling clay toys and utensils door to door. On Feb 4 they left home as usual with their basket of toys but didn’t return. We raised alarm. “Aft...

Over 50 Hindu families migrate to India every month. According to Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, the founder of the Karachi-based Pakistan Hindu Council, this is due to the failure of the Pakistani government to find a solution to the acute sense of discontentment among Hindus arising, in part, from increasing incidence of forced conversion, particularly in Sindh province in southern Pakistan. Recently,  Pakistani parliamentarians blamed the Taliban  for the plight of Hindus and attributed the development to an international conspiracy to defame Pakistan. In fact, many in the Pakistani political establishment consider the problem of Hindu migration as nothing more than individual cases of disgruntlement, rather than a worrying trend. There are over seven million Hindus in Pakistan and approximately 94 per cent of them are in Sindh province (especially in Hyderabad, Karachi, Tharparkat, Mithi, Mirpur Khas, Shikarpur and Sukkur). Soon after partition, Hindus constituted over 15...

I grew up in fear – every face around me depicted nothing but fear. I am sure that the first expression on my parent’s face on my birth as a female child born to Hindu parents living in Kandhkot would have been that of fear also. Why did I bring so much fear into the lives of my parents? I grew up always wondering what is it about me that continues to terrify. But I always drew a blank. How naïve I was. Before I knew it, the time to attend school had arrived. School was comfortable; however, there were times when I felt like an outsider, finding it difficult to gel in with rest of the majority. Perhaps the snide remarks and incidents of discrimination led me to believe that I am not one of ‘them’. Of those incidents, I still vividly remember no one eating with me and refusing to sip from the cup I drank from. Home wasn’t very different either. My mother asked questions about my life at school and otherwise looking for answers that would somehow relinquish her from the unknown fear....