Organization: Penn State University
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 19:57:28 EDT
From: <DXA4@psuvm.psu.edu>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Hindu Refugees

For the last ten years Hindus have become victims of terrorism and religious
fundamentalism not only in India but abroad also. This has created a large
number of these unfortunate people as helpless refugees living in utter pathe-
tic conditions. And the government and the authorities concerned pay any atten-
tion to their plight. Most political parties are also indifferent. The sole
crime of these people is that they are Hindus. Here I reproduce some excerpts
from an article on this issue recently published in Sunday (Weekly), July 5-11,
1992.
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   The parallels with 1947 are tempting. Then too, there were the refugees
flowing in from the north-west, limping in from the east. But partition saw a
two-way migration of peoples. The Hindus who streamed in from the Punjab, clut-
ching their possessions close to their chests, were balanced by another stream
of Muslims.......

   This time the migration is strictly one way. No parallel exists in history.
Yes,Indians were thrown out of Kenya in the 1960s, and out of Idi Amin's Uganda
in 1972. But then, both Hindus and Muslims were as unwanted. And their chief
crime appeared to be that they were more prosperous than the average Black. Now
prosperity has little to do with it. The only crime committed by the thousands
who seek shelter from the rain, huddeled in the squalor of refugee camps, is
that they are Hindus.

   Nor does the flow of refugees have much to do with any kind of religious
partition. All that has happened in Afghanistan is that a regime composed
almost entirely of trigger-happy, fundamentally-Islamic Mujahideen has decided
to fire its bazookas into that country's secular tradition. And so Hindus who
have never ever been to India, and Sikhs who have lived in Afghanistan for gene
rations, have fled for their lives.

  Uniquely, the migration does not necessarily involve international boundaries
To be a Hindu in the Kashmir Valley today is a high-risk business. The once-
proud Kashmiri pundits admired through the ages for their erudition and their
shrewdness, have been transformed into a community on the run, fleeing from
their own state in their own country, simply because a new breed of militants
objects to their beliefs.

   And the migration has its own contradictions. For the victorious Islamic
Mujahideen in Kabul, Sikhs and Hindus are both Kafirs. In Kashmir, the militant
s hope to use Pakistan to forge links with Sikh terrorists in Punjab so that
both can fight the Hindus. And in Punjab itself, Sikh militants have driven
Hindus out of their homes.

   There is more. There's Bangladesh which sends a constant stream of Hindu
refugees into collapsing economy of West Bengal. There's Sri Lanka, where lakhs
of Tamil refugees claim persecution at the hands of the ruling Buddhist Sinhala
community.

   Forty-five years after we thought that the ghosts of 1947 had been exorcised
for ever, refugee camps dot the Indian heartland like sores from some communal
malady.

   Suddenly, Indians are waking up to a new reality: the Hindu as refugee.

   The refugee exodus is replete with irony. In most cases, the refugees have
been thrown out simply because they are Hindus. They have come to India - often
for the first time in their lives - simply because they see it as a Hindu count
ry. And yet, the Indian government, quite correctly (???), refuses to see
people as Hindus, Muslims or whatever.....

   Inevitably, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
(VHP) have sensed the political potential of the issue. Ashok Singhal, secre-
tary general of the VHP, has written to Narsimha Rao, expressing concern at the
statement made by the then Afghan President, S. Mojaddidi, that the treatment
of Indian muslims would determine his government's attitude to India and Indian
s. Characteristically Singhal went on to add: "When a similar situation had
arisen in Kuwait, the government of Bharat had taken immediate steps to evecua-
te all such stranded Bharatvashis through air flights." As the VHP never tires
of reminding newsmen, most of those stranded in Kuwait were Muslims. Why, it
asks, can't a similar effort be made on behalf of the Hindus?

  Narsimha Rao wrote back to Singhal stating: "We have already conveyed our
concern regarding President Mojaddidi's statement on Kashmir and Indian muslims
." Privately, many ministers concede that the Afghan situation offers much
cause for concern, particularly as the Mujahideen are now talking about uniting
with Pakistan and the Kashmiri militants to launch a war on India.

  Unfortunately, other secular parties continue to deny the anti-Hindu element
to the exodus of Indians from Afghanistan, leaving the field open for the BJP.
For instance, Inder Gujral, who as the Janata Dal foreign minister visited
Kuwait to bless Saddam Hussein's invasion, continues to maintain that there is
no threat to people of Indian origin in Afghanistan on religious grounds.....

   Because such politicians as Gujral seek to deny the obvious, the BJP can
make the most of the issue. Says the party's Kedar Nath Sahani: "When members
of any minority community are affected there is always a big outcry. But when
Hindus are hounded out of Afghanistan, Punjab and Kashmir, the government is
careful not to react too sharply. This is obviously an attempt to cultivate a
vote bank."

  In fact, what the government is probably trying to do is avoid inflamming
communal passions. But its method of doing so involves constructing a wall of
silence. Hemant Kumar Singh, the foreign ministry's joint secretary, in charge
of its Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan section, avoided meeting SUNDAY. And our
efforts to elicit information on the exodus from Afghanistan were rebuffed....

   Meanwhile, there is concern about the fate of Indians elsewhere in the world
. There are 12 lakh people of Indian origin in Trinidad, 40,000 in Jamaica,
another 7 lakh in Surinam and Guyana, 10 lakh each in the US, UK, Canada and
South Africa, a lakh in East Africa, 400,000 in Fiji and a sizable proportion
in Mauritius and the Gulf.

  The example of the East African Asians should have served as a warning, but
most of them had British passports, and few wanted to come to India. But since
then, Britain has altered its citizenship laws. Many fear that should an extrem
ist Black regime in South Africa start persecuting the Asians, people of Indian
origin will have nowhere else to go except for the mother country. Already,
there are fears of an exodus from Fiji, where Indians get an increasingly
worse deal.

  But these are qualitatively different cases. Immigrant communities face
discrimination wherever they go. And most ethnic groups manage to stick it out
until they become accepted by the host culture - as the Jews have demonstrated
in America and England.

  What makes the current situation unique is that the discrimination comes from
a single source: growing dislike of Hindus as a religious rather than an ethnic
group.....

   Today, the Sikhs and the Punjabi Hindus form part of the same ethnic group -
it is only religion that divides them. And the same is true of Bengali Hindus
and Muslims.

   It is an unfamiliar role for Hindus to play. And unless the balance is
restored, the danger of a violent backlash will remain.

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 Dinesh Agrawal......
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian