Archaeology in Pakistan is forced to deny its Hindu past
Don’t be taken in by
the Pakistan government’s lip-service to becoming a multi-religious society
every time it promises the repair or reconstruction of a destroyed Hindu temple
in that country. It just cannot mean what it says in this context.
That is the way to
read the recent drama in Pakistan over what was announced as the first Hindu
temple in the capital city, Islamabad. The reality, instead, played out
somewhere else in the country, just before the dawn of the new year, 2021, in
the wanton destruction of a temple in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
If it were left to
the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, it would dig up the country all the way down
to erase the last vestige of Hindu heritage and thousands of years of cultural
and religious history that makes its own 73-year-old history a blip in the
cosmos of sub-continental civilisation.
The controversy over
repair or reconstruction of Hindu temples in Pakistan has been playing out
since June 2020 when Prime Minister Imran Khan declared that his government was
allocating $1.3 million for the construction of a new temple complex, the Shri
Krishna Mandir, in Islamabad. The complex would have a community hall, a large
parking area, accommodation for pilgrims and a crematorium.
The foundation stone
was laid on Jun 23. Within a week, a Lahore-based Islamic institution, Jamia
Ashrafia, issued a fatwa stating the construction of the temple was not permissible
under Islam. Punjab Assembly Speaker Chaudhary Pervaiz Elahi backed the fatwa
citing the reasoning as correct.
Pressure grew on the
government to withdraw its commitment to the temple. It did so on Jul 3. Two
days later, a mob demolished a boundary wall. By Jul 7, police were guarding
the demolished construction site.
To save face, the Imran Khan government referred the case to the Council of Islamic Ideology, a national body that rules on religious issues. In late October, the Council said the construction of the temple was not against Islamic law, but the government cannot spend public money directly on the construction of a minority place of worship. The Council made everyone happy. Khan’s word was kept. The fatwa was not dishonoured either.
Around the time the
Islamic Council was examining the temple case, an ancient Hanuman temple was
demolished in Karachi, in August. Around 20 Hindu dwellings near the temple
were also razed to the ground. No, it was not an act of the government. A local
builder, who had purchased the land around the temple, brazenly brought down
the temple. He could do it with impunity. Also, the coronavirus lockdown helped
him. Nobody chided him.
The Karachi example
is indicative of the mood in Pakistan about minority religious establishments,
irrespective of what Prime Minister Khan says or does. It is not that Khan is
altruistic. The Financial Action Task Force and Amnesty International are at his
heels, ready to pounce on even a minor misdemeanour and hand him an economic
sanction.
In April 2019 the
Khan government announced it will restore Hindu temples and give them back to
the Hindu community. The number of such temples, which had been turned into
madrasas or government offices or shops and homes over the decades, stood at
around 400. The government even decided which two temples will benefit right
away: two famous temples in Peshawar and Sialkot.
That July, the
government handed over Sialkot’s Shwala Teja Singh temple to the Hindu
community. It was re-opening after 72 years. It had been damaged by vandals in
retaliation to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. The Gorakhnath
temple in Peshawar was also declared a heritage site.
If these
developments were seen as attempts by Imran Khan to project Pakistan as a
secular country in front of the world, his political chicanery was soon exposed
too. In February 2020, the Pakistan government made a great propaganda show out
of the handing over of an ancient Hindu temple to the Hindu community in
Balochistan. The government apologised to the community for keeping the temple
under unlawful occupation since Partition in 1947.
It was a cleverly
managed public relations exercise. By February, the anti-Citizenship Amendment
Act protests in India were at their peak. One of the provisions of the act was
awarding citizenship to Hindus living in Islamic countries, like Pakistan, who
were fleeing those countries on grounds of religious persecution. The Balochistan
temple served as an example for Khan to show there was no such persecution of
minority Hindus in Pakistan.
Well-known academic,
journalist and anthropologist, Haroon Rashid, was among the first to expose the
dire straits of places of worships of minority religions in Pakistan.
Documenting his travels in Pakistan, Rashid wrote what is considered an epochal
article in 2013 in which he visited Hindu temples across Pakistan to see for
himself how they fared at present. He told the stories of Hindu and Jain
temples in Lahore, Multan and Malka Hans which were converted into madrasas,
but strangely the Hindu architecture, paintings, motifs and other religious
signs were not tampered with.
Khalid’s writings
told a larger story. They told you the significance of the cities and towns
where these temples existed. These places were much older than the temples.
That is probably why these temples came up there. These places were known, in
ancient times, thousands of years ago, for their Hindu rulers who figured in
the Mahabharata or Ramayana or other Hindu texts or, in later periods, entered
history books as being part of Hindu kingdoms.
For instance, as
Khalid stated, the ancient city of Multan is “believed to have been once ruled
by Hiranyakashipu, the tyrant father of Bhakta Prahlada (Bhagat Prahaladain
Punjabi). Bhagat Prahlada, by the way, is the patron saint of Multan.
We are coming to the
crux of Pakistan’s essential hatred of its Hindu minority.
In their work in The
Dawn newspaper of Pakistan on Lahore’s shift “from a cosmopolitan to monolithic
culture”, three academics, Samee Ahmed, Aliza Amin and Mohammad Samee Arif come
up with an intense piece of writing: “In Pakistan, the Hindus have never been
persecuted, says Shams Gill, but the anger against us has been vented on our
temples. Gill has reached the crux of the issue: Pakistani Hindus, a term that
many consider to be an oxymoron, are represented through physical space.”
If they know what
they are writing, what they are saying is this: It is not Hindus that Pakistan
decries. It is their history that lies buried in every inch of Pakistan. That
country has been busy since 1947 not in developing itself into a modern nation,
but busy erasing “its” Hindu heritage. That is achieved not by harassing the minority
Hindus but by destroying Hindu cultural and religious blocks, along with those
of the Jains and Buddhists, which dominated and influenced life in the region
long before Pakistan was born.
An Indian newspaper
wrote last August: “…frustration has developed into resistance towards
acceptance and cherishing of a minority culture and its symbols. This hate has
spread across the land. It is not confined to a handful of regions or people.
The poison against minorities, particularly Hindus, has seeped deep into the
society. Since separation from India, hundreds of Pakistan temples have quietly
disappeared and many have morphed into shops, mosques and other buildings. The
efforts to erase the past have been vociferous”.
Destroying minority
places of worship in Pakistan even as its government promises a multi-religious
environment only reinforces the inevitable that the Pakistani State cannot but
be monolithic.
Haroon Khalid says
it the best: “How archaeology in Pakistan is forced to deny the nation’s Hindu
past”.