October  2005 
Year 12    No.111

Dalit Drishti


Scourge of the subcontinent

The plight of Dalits in Pakistan: A book review

BY YOGINDER SIKAND

Hamey Bhi Jeeney Do: Pakistan Mai Acchoot Logon ki Suratehal [‘Let us Also Live: The Situation of the Untouchables in Pakistan’] (Urdu)

By Pirbhu Lal Satyani ([email protected])

Publisher: ASR Resource Centre, Lahore, Pakistan ([email protected])

Year: 2005

Price: Rs. 20 (Pakistani)

Caste, the scourge of Hinduism, is so deeply entrenched in Indian society that it has not left the ad-
herents of Islam, Sikhism, Christianity and Buddhism – theoretically egalitarian religions – unaffected. So firmly rooted is the cancer of caste in the region that it survives and thrives in neighbouring Pakistan, where over 95 per cent of the population is Muslim, as this slim book tells us.

Pirbhu Lal Satyani, the author of the book, is a Pakistani Hindu social activist based in Lahore, working among the Dalits in his country. Of Pakistan’s roughly three million Hindu population, he says, over 75 per cent are Dalits belonging to various castes, the most prominent being Meghwals, Odhs, Valmikis, Kohlis and Bhils. They reside mainly in southern Punjab and Sindh. Satyani provides startling details about the plight of Dalits in Pakistan, which appears to be no different from that of Dalits in India.

In a speech in 1944, Satyani writes, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, declared that the Muslim League would protect the rights of Dalits and assured them of full security. Accordingly, Jogendra Nath Mondal, a Dalit from East Bengal, was appointed leader of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan and the first Law Minister of the country. This suggests, Satyani says, that Jinnah was genuine in his concern for the Dalits of Pakistan. However, things began to change after Jinnah’s death, and in 1953 Mondal resigned from the Cabinet and migrated to India. This was an indication of the growing intolerance towards minorities in post-Jinnah Pakistan. Today, as Satyani shows, minorities lead a bleak existence in Pakistan, the worst sufferers among them being the country’s Dalits.

Following the partition of India, Satyani says, most Hindus living in what is now Pakistan migrated to India. The vast majority of those who stayed back in Pakistan were Dalits. In the years after Partition, he writes, there has been a steady migration of Hindus to India, especially in the immediate aftermath of the 1965 and 1971 wars between India and Pakistan. The destruction of the Babri Masjid in India in 1992 and the ensuing massacre of Muslims in different parts of India by Hindutva extremists led to a heightening of insecurity among Pakistani Hindus, causing a sizeable number of them to migrate to India. Most of these migrants were ‘upper’ caste Hindus. Lacking money and resources, Dalits in Pakistan were unable to make the same choice. In addition, Satyani writes, "The Dalits are so caught up with mere day-to-day survival issues that Hindu-Muslim conflicts or Pakistan-India disputes are not as important for them as they are for rich upper caste Hindus". To add to this is probably the fact that life for Dalits in India is hardly better than in Pakistan.

Most Pakistani Dalits work as landless agricultural labourers and sweepers, Satyani writes. In rural areas, their huts are located in separate settlements outside the main village and they generally lack even basic amenities. Large numbers of Dalits also lead a nomadic existence, travelling from village to village in search of manual work. Many Dalits live in temporary structures on the land of landlords for whom they work and having no title to the land, can be expelled from there whenever the landlords wish. They generally earn a pittance and are often forced into free labour by powerful upper caste Hindu and Muslim feudal lords. Many Dalits eke out a miserable existence as bonded labourers, being heavily indebted to landlords and moneylenders. If they protest, false cases are lodged against them and the police do little or nothing to protect them. Local administrative officers routinely harass them and even forcibly take away their cattle and other such belongings. Land mafias in rural Sindh often forcibly grab the land on which Dalits build their huts. In most places, Dalits have no temples of their own. They have few places where they can burn their dead, and many of these are illegally occupied by local Muslims.

In village schools, Satyani tells us, Dalit students routinely face discrimination and are not allowed to use utensils that are used by other students. In school, Dalit students are often badly treated by Muslim teachers and students. Despite being the poorest of the poor, they do not receive any scholarships on the grounds that money for scholarships comes from zakat funds and hence it is not permissible for non-Muslims to avail of them. Further, owing to desperate poverty few Dalits can afford to send their children for higher education, and generally, children are withdrawn from school at an early age to engage in manual work to help supplement the family’s meagre income. In many cases Dalits do not send their girls to school fearing that they might be kidnapped, raped or forced to convert to Islam.

In towns and cities, Dalits generally live in the poorest parts, in squalid slums. There are no organisations working among them for their welfare and lacking a strong political leadership of their own, they are not able to effectively assert their voice in demanding their rights from the State or from larger society, not even to protest in cases of human rights violations. Many of them do not possess national identity cards and so cannot access various government developmental schemes. Government facilities for religious minorities are almost monopolised by the country’s more powerful and organised Christian and upper caste Hindu communities, leaving the Dalits untouched.

Because of acute poverty, rampant illiteracy and discrimination and the absence of a Dalit movement as in India, Dalits in Pakistan have no political influence at all, Satyani says. In many places, Dalits are not allowed to vote freely for candidates of their choice. They are often forced by powerful upper caste Hindu and Muslim landlords to vote for particular candidates, and if they refuse they are pressurised into leaving their homes or are beaten up. The problem of Dalit political marginalisation is complicated by the acute divisions among the Dalits, with various Dalit castes practising untouchability among themselves. For its part, the Pakistani State, Satyani says, prefers to promote the economically and socially more influential upper caste Hindus as leaders of the Hindus instead of trying to promote an alternate Dalit leadership. Thus, for instance, in 2002, of the nine seats reserved for the Sindh provincial assembly for religious minorities, seven were for Hindus and only one for Dalits, while Dalits account for more than 70 per cent of the Hindu population of the province. The State’s lack of commitment to helping the Dalits is also evident from the fact that despite there being some 3,50,000 Dalits in southern Punjab (mainly in the Rahim Yar Khan and Bahawalpur districts) there are no reserved seats for Dalits or Hindus in the provincial assembly. All the seats reserved for minorities in the assembly for minorities are occupied by Christians.

Further, government affirmative policies meant especially for Dalits have been done away with, Satyani writes. While Jinnah had provided a six per cent job quota for Dalits in some government services, in 1998 the Nawaz Sharif government, assisted by some upper caste Hindu and Christian leaders, changed the Dalit quota to a general minorities’ quota thus effectively denying Dalits assured access to government jobs.

Dalits, like other minorities in Pakistan, Satyani tells us, are also victims of religious discrimination by both Muslims as well as upper caste Hindus. Despite the Hindus being a minority in Pakistan, upper caste Hindus continue to discriminate against the Dalits. Generally, Dalits are refused entry into Hindu temples belonging to the upper castes. Upper caste Hindu landlords and businessmen in Sindh, Satyani writes, show little concern for the plight of Dalits and instead are often complicit, along with Muslim feudal lords, in oppressing them.

As in large parts of India, in eateries in the rural areas of Sindh, owned by both upper caste Hindus as well as Muslims, Dalits are forced to use separate utensils and are expected to wash them themselves after use. When they visit hospitals for treatment they are generally left unattended and being considered untouchables, are not allowed to touch utensils meant for public use there. Often Dalit women are gang-raped, murdered or are forced to convert to Islam, but no action is taken against the perpetrators of these crimes. Besides this, due to discrimination by upper caste Hindus, many Dalits have converted to Islam and Christianity of their own accord.

Satyani ends his book with a list of recommendations for addressing the plight of Dalits in his country. He suggests that the Government of Pakistan should insist that the question of Dalit human rights and amelioration of their pathetic conditions be included as part of the SAARC agenda. This, presumably, would force all SAARC member States, including India, to take the issue of caste oppression seriously. He calls for the setting up of a national commission in Pakistan to monitor the conditions of the country’s Dalits and to work for their welfare. Dalits, he says, should be given reserved seats in the national and provincial assemblies in accordance with their population as well as adequate representation in all government services. In areas with a high Dalit population, councils should be created by the State for development of the Dalits. All ‘black laws’ against religious minorities should be repealed, Satyani advises, and to improve relations between different religious communities the educational curriculum should be revised and negative portrayals of non-Muslim communities and their religions should be deleted.

Landless labourers should be granted titles to land. Hindu, including Dalit, employees should be given holidays on the occasion of their festivals. Dalit communities that do not have any cremation grounds of their own should be provided with such facilities. Dalits should be given the right to use public wells and taps and to live within the villages, instead, as of now, outside them. And Hindu temples currently under the control of the Waqf department should be given back to the community. In schools with a sizeable Hindu population, Hindu children should be provided with the facilities to study their own religion instead of Islam.

Whether the State authorities are willing to accede to these demands, however, is another question.

Pirbhu Lal Satyani can be contacted on [email protected]. Indian Dalit readers could help Pirbhu Lal by sending him Dalit literature in English or Urdu.

(Dr. Yoginder Sikand; Email: [email protected]).


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