Violation of Human Rights of Hindus in India
By: Capt SB Tyagi
The Afghanistan is for Afghans?
China is for Chinese as Japan is for Japanese?
Yeah, for sure!
Is Hindustan for Hindus?
Umm, well… I dunno!
Who are Hindus?
As a “spiritual community” of related religious and cultural practices (the major religious groups within Hinduism are Vaishnava, Smartha, Shaiva, and Shakta), Hindus do not adhere to a single Scripture, or owe allegiance to a single religious institution. Hindus regard Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs as a part of their own wider family though they constitute distinct religious traditions themselves. The fate of Buddhists in Tibet since 1950 is a matter of tragic historical significance that has been the subject of investigation by various international agencies. Hindus constitute 80.5% of the population of India.
(http://www.censusindia.net/religiondata)
Hindu Diaspora
Followers of Hindu traditions, with a population estimated at nearly one billion people, constitute the third largest religious group in the world, after Christians (about two billion or 33% of the world’s population) and Muslims (1.2 billion or about 20%). The majority of Hindus live in the Indian sub-continent and, numbering nearly 827 millions. However, the Hindu Diaspora reaches beyond the Indian subcontinent to Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and North America where they comprise substantial minorities. In Fiji and some Caribbean nations, Hindus comprise of a significant portion of the population, with representation at the highest levels of government.
http://www.hinduamericanfoundation.org
India is Hindusthan
India that is Hindusthan (Why it is still called India I don’t understand?) is a country where all are free the practice their religion and maintain their religious identity. All are to be treated as equal and there should not be any discrimination. When minorities are to be ensured freedom of practice of their religions, this does not mean that it will be at the cost of putting restrictions on the majority class! When ethnic minority will be protected the subjugation and exploitation of ethnic majority may also be avoided. When protection of human rights of minorities is priority item for the government, the breach of Hindu human rights can not be ignored.
A nationalistic and patriotic Hindu of post-independent India, who derives his inspiration and nationalistic idealism from the teachings of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Bipin Chandra Pal, Bal Gangadar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Vir Savarkar, and such other incomparable patriots, has great difficulty in feeling himself to be a part of the ‘imaginary Nation’ (a Pseudo Secular Anti-Hindu Notion!!) for which the whole national system today is being operated by the all the Governments in India.
“It is because of politically motivated and criminally perpetrated hiatus between a false Nation (Notion!!) and a truly blood-sucking State that there is a continuous proliferation of selfishness, corruption and moral degradation in all walks of our national life today. The larger ‘Hindu National Society’ has been totally alienated from the State and the national will to boldly face all the problem confronting our nation today has all but vanished.”
-V Sundaram
(http://www.newstodaynet.com/2007sud/sep07/070907.htm)
What is secularism?
There is an increasing fraud and dishonesty at the core of the Indian secular establishment. Secularism means, at once, a distancing of the institutions of governance from communal influence, but also sensitivity towards all religious communities and faiths – not just a particular minority vote-bank.
“The current, contentious and prejudiced orientation of so-called ‘secular’ forces in national politics reflects a complete collapse of political intellect.”
– KPS Gill
Main Religions in India: 1991- 2001 – Hindus will be minority soon!
Population of religious groups and their distribution and growth rate: At the national level, of 1028 million population, 828 million (80.5 percent) have returned their religion as Hindus followed by 138 million (13.4 percent) as Muslims and 24 millions (2.3 percent) Christians. 19 million (1.9 percent) persons follow Sikh religion; 8 million (0.8 percent) are Buddhists and 4.2 million (0.4 percent) are Jains as per the 2001 Census. In addition to these, 6.6 million belong to ‘Other Religions and Persuasions’ including tribal religions which are not part of the six main religions stated above. It is interesting to note that about seven lakhs (or 0.7 million) persons have not stated their religion.
http://www.censusindia.net/religiondata/Brief_analysis.pdf
The comparative studies show that the rate of population is increasing in case of Muslims whereas in case of Hindus it is decreasing.
1991 2001
Hindus 687,646,721 82.00 % 827,578,686 80.5
Muslims 101,596,057 12.12 % 138,188,240 13.4
Christians 19,640,284 2.34 % 24,080,016 2.3
The adjusted growth rate of Hindu population has come down from 22.8 percent in 1981-91 to 20.0 percent in 1991-2001.
Majority versus Minority
We are all for the protection of human rights of all communities, irrespective of caste, creed and religious denominations. Rights of the minorities are undoubtedly sacrosanct. But the same degree of protection must also be available to the members of the majority community. Their rights to life, property, worship and liberty are being gradually and regularly threatened, even extinguished by the terrorists, government agencies and various other un-named hostile groups. Santana Dharma, Hindu Religion, Hindu Society, Hindu culture and Hindu ethos are under the siege of certain lethal international (!) forces, enjoying the full official support of the Government of India today.
Unfortunately the subject has been widely ignored by the media and the intelligentsia far too long, thereby leading to the build-up of a feeling among members of the majority community that they have been reduced to the status of children of a lesser god in their ancient homeland. While the ‘secular’ political class, mainstream media, the National Human Rights Commission and multiple NGOs are seen clamoring at the drop of a hat for protection of the human rights of minorities, no tears are shed nor any concern ever expressed about the plight of the members of the majority community.
Some of the glaring examples are the callous disregard of the plight of lakhs of Hindus ethnically cleansed from Kashmir Valley and the recent threats by terrorists to migrant Hindu laborers ordering them to quit Kashmir on pain of death. A similar silent campaign of ethnic cleansing of Hindus (euphemistically called ‘Hindi-speaking’) living in Assam and certain parts of northeast has also gathered momentum in recent times. No one, however, seems to be bothered about such abominable violation of human rights. Then there is a long standing complaint about the misuse of the funds and lands of Hindu temples by avaricious State governments.
It has, therefore, been imperative that an in-depth objective study of the ongoing spectacle of violation of human rights of the majority community is undertaken and then correct facts are placed before the Indian public, National Human Rights Commission and the international community.
Government’s approach of minority appeasement
“There is a new and escalating insensitivity in Indian secular thought, which not only insistently neglects the sensibilities of the majority community, but, worse, appears eager to cause injury to such sentiments. India’s opportunistic political secularists – as distinct from those who are, in fact and practice, actually wedded to the secular ideology – feel that they cannot sufficiently proclaim their secularism without displaying at least a measure of contempt for Hindu beliefs and practices.”
-K P S Gill
By contrast, the most extraordinary sensitivity – often transgressing not only the limits of good sense, but even considerations of national interest – is prominently displayed towards the Muslim minority vote-bank (though other minorities – with their smaller shares in electoral contests – are ironically treated with the same contempt that is directed against the majority community). These tendencies appear to be getting worse with the passage of time, and a precipitous decline in the quality of political debate and intelligence is manifest.”
Vanishing Hindu Population: India and West Bengal Census Data
Three Main Religions in West Bengal (1991)
Hindus 50,866,624 74.7 % (1961: 78.8%, decreased 4.1%)
Muslims 16,075,836 23.6 % (1961: 20%, increased 3.6%)
Christians 383,477 0.6 % (1961: 0.5%, increased 0.1%)
West Bengal (1961-1991)
Year Total Hindu Muslim
1961 34.92 78.8 20.0
1991 68.07 74.7 23.6
2001 58.10 72.5 25.2
Source: Census of India 1991 (http://www.censusindia.net/)
Source: Census of India 2001 (http://www.censusindia.net/religiondata)
Blatant Violation of human right of Hindus in Kashmir
The Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir is the focus of territorial claims by Pakistan, which has encouraged and abetted terrorism, successfully expelling the entire Hindu population of several hundred thousand from the Kashmir Valley through a campaign of murder, rape and kidnappings. Pakistani military posturing and an alleged threat of nuclear warfare have diverted attention from the reality of atrocities against Hindus in Kashmir since 1989. Successive Indian governments have paid scant attention to the fate of the Hindu minority of Kashmir because they have concluded that attempting to address their legitimate concerns might constitute an avoidable distraction for the political resolution of the dispute over Kashmir. The media in India and abroad have taken the cue from this fateful governmental silence over the human rights violations of Kashmiri Hindus by largely ignoring them. World human rights organizations have also been muted in their response to the tragedy that has overtaken Kashmiri Hindus.
Only the committed demographers in the country realize that Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) are a minority in the Muslim majority Kashmir valley of a Hindu majority India.
Islamist militants threatened to kill Hindus if they return to the Kashmir Valley after escaping the start of the bloody insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir nearly fifteen years ago. “There is a complete ban on the return of Pandits (Hindus),” said a joint statement from four Kashmiri Muslim militant groups—some based in Pakistan. “They will be allowed to return only if they accept India’s rule over Kashmir as illegitimate and tyrannical, and participate in the freedom struggle with full fervor. (If) they do not accept these conditions, we will have the right to avenge blood with blood.”
• Over 300,000 Kashmiri Hindus have been forced to leave due to ethnic cleansing abetted by Kashmiri Muslims.
• These 300,000 Hindus are refugees in their own country, sheltered in temporary camps near Delhi and elsewhere.
• More than 3,000 Hindu civilians have been killed, and thousands more Hindu police and army personnel have succumbed to terrorist violence. There are virtually no Hindus left in the Kashmir Valley; they have all been driven out.
The Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) in the valley of Kashmir, irrespective of their age, sex, position status or situation became the prime target of the terrorists’ onslaught. They were warned and threatened, individually and collectively, through word of mouth, through insinuation and innuendo, through posters and press and over loud speakers installed in thousands of mosques all over the valley. They were followed and kidnapped from their homes and places of work and interrogated and tortured. A spree of killings of the intellectuals of the community started. This was followed by indiscriminate gunning down, hanging, dismembering, tying with grenades and blasting into pieces, skinning, burning and sawing alive the members of this ethnic minority of all walks of life. Many of the victims after being butchered were thrown into streets as exhibits for everybody to get terrorized. The bereaved were not permitted to mourn the dead and perform the last rites. Those who dared to attend the funeral were earmarked for reprisals. Molestation and rape was the order of the day.
Intimidatory warnings
Not content with the tempo of exodus of the ethnic minority community, the Muslim religious zealots pressed into service the local daily newspapers and started periodic write ups in a vituperative and malicious propaganda offensive against the Kashmiri Hindus, culminating in repeated warnings and final ultimatum through the pages of “Daily Alsafa” on l4th April,1990 giving the community two days to leave the valley or face retribution and death. The good Samaritans of the Muslim majority community who had offered help, solace and protection to the Kashmiri Pandits were also threatened, coerced and subdued to fall in line with the fundamentalist designs and they, therefore, advised the Kashmiri Pandits to leave the valley for a ‘temporary period’ till normalcy returned to the valley. Both gentle and well meaning persuasion was adopted side by side with covert and overt threats to recalcitrant Hindus forcing them into exodus. Meanwhile unbridled violence and brutal murders went on. More than one thousand Hindus have been killed, hundreds are missing, possibly dead or kept hostage. Women have been held captive in remote hideouts of the terrorists to satisfy their lust. An unspecified number of those Hindus who are still living in the valley in mortal terror are victims of extortion, religious persecution and kidnappings.
In run-up to full-fledged war referred as Kargil War, there were few clashes as advance indications. In the course of those clashes, over 1,200 people, many of them civilian, were killed by artillery fire. Civilians were also forced to flee the towns along the 720-kilometer border that divides Indian and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Communal violence between Hindu and Muslim groups escalated during the military confrontation, particularly in Jammu, the Hindu-majority area of the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
Terrorists’ propaganda
Are Hindus cowards?
Indian writers, intellectuals, NGOs, civic groups, media and even political parties often protest against injustice or atrocities in their own country or in other countries. It is time that they started such protests about the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Kashmir.
This report from the Hindu American Foundation has all the data and the facts, but is not tainted by the partisanship and the “secular” versus “communal” debate inside India. Unless there is popular pressure in India, the Government of India will do nothing and Bangladesh and Pakistan will do nothing.
There may soon be no Hindus left in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Neither India nor its directly culpable neighbors in the sub-continent can afford such an outcome.
Hindus are at the end of their tether
All over India, the pattern of Hindu victimization is the same. The combination of Pakistani-sponsored violence and local anti-Hindu sentiment has led to a similar “religious cleansing” of the Kashmir valley in the states neighboring the borders with Bangladesh, Pakistan and Myanmar, where most of the Hindus have started fleeing.
Much like the Bangladeshi Hindu refugees in India, the Kashmiri Hindus are an unpalatable subject for many Indians, an ideological embarrassment for some people who feel uneasy about discussing the persecution of Hindus by Muslims. Some Indians still prefer to blame the Indian government for the flight of Kashmiri Hindus, deliberately ignoring the campaign launched by various Muslim groups to use public threats and violence, including murder, to terrify the local Hindus into leaving.
Heed the New Hindu Mood
Some Indians may feel uncomfortable because they do not want to be reminded about the problems of Hindus outside their milieu. And for some in the Indian intelligentsia, it is a badge of honor to distance themselves from these pogroms as a mark of their supposed enlightenment, oddly trashing their own ethos in the process. Many more Indians are reluctant to speak out against atrocities committed against Hindus for fear of being labeled “communal”. Merely speaking about human rights for Hindus is for them a form of communalism.
These arguments are false. The people whose persecution is amply documented in this report are being persecuted because they are Hindu, not because they are poor or because of their political views. Brave human rights activists in Bangladesh and Pakistan, many of whom are not Hindus, have painstakingly documented the violations of basic human rights of Hindus in their country.
How ironic, and revealing about modern Indian culture, that so many Indians, most of whom are Hindus, are reluctant to acknowledge the problem, let alone do something about it. The sad reality of this world is that if Indians do not care about the persecution of Hindus nobody else will.
http://us.rediff.com/news/2005/aug/13guest1.htm
The dispossession of the Hindus
What is to be done? The thugs and bigots attacking Hindus do not care for the liberal sensibilities of human rights people in any country. They understand power and nothing else. In an inter-connected world in which India is emerging as a new power, Indians can make a difference. The matter cannot be left to the Indian government alone. It cannot act without public support.
Moreover, the governments, and the scotch-sipping socialists in Delhi, typically lack the courage to ignore Muslim vote-bank politics in India and publicly address this problem.
Indians, meaning all Indians and not just Hindus, have to speak out by themselves. It is in everybody’s interest to build an India that provides equal treatment and respect to all its citizens, regardless of religion. The same principle should be demanded of Bangladesh and Pakistan.
It is not just Hindus but also Muslims, Sikhs and others in India who, if they believe in equality, should insist in public that India’s neighbors show respect for the human rights of minorities.
India’s own human rights record is not faultless but is remarkably good for a country of its diversity and poverty. India has a vibrant civil society, plus public institutions like the judiciary and the media, who speak out against persecution and demand that the constitution be respected. That is India’s strength, and the reason its people have the right to demand similar behavior of its neighbors when it comes to human rights in their own countries.
Appeal to all Hindus of the world
It is high time that the conscience of mankind and specially Hindus awakens to the reality of the situation in Kashmir, Assam and other states where the so-called freedom struggle is merely an extension and escalation of the ongoing offensive against ancient and distinct ethno-religious community which has been turned into a minority in many states – the Hindus – who are being exterminated under a diabolical plan masterminded by religious zealots turned terrorists with the direction, support and connivance of their mentors from across the border in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
We appeal, therefore
To all the nations of the world –
• to all peace loving, secular and democratic countries which value and recognize the urges, aspirations and just rights of minorities round the globe;
• to all organizations that monitor and report on human rights’ violations against ethnic religious communities; and to all individuals, groups and institutions that stand for justice, equality, religious tolerance and human dignity to break their silence and speak out and save this ancient and distinct ethnic-religious group which is, now, facing victimization, state sponsored atrocities and communal hatred from Muslim fundamentalists and terrorists which has potential danger of dispersal, disintegration and extinction.
Conclusion
“Why should Hindus become helpless refugees in their own ancestral HOMELAND? It is my inalienable, indivisible, inexorable and immutable birth right to demand the creation of a Hindu Nation. I am not ashamed or afraid of declaring from the housetop that I am a political Hindu, a cultural Hindu, a spiritual Hindu, an economic Hindu, a nationalist Hindu, an internationalist Hindu and above all a cosmopolitan Hindu. I am forced to assert on these lines because Sanatana Dharma, Hindu Religion, Hindu Society, Hindu culture and Hindu ethos are under the siege of certain lethal international (!) forces, enjoying the full official support of the Government of India today.
-V Sundaram”
At the end, following points need qualified attention of every Hindu –
• At Global level Bangladesh and Pakistan represents an ongoing crisis for Hindus and is of utmost immediate concern.
• Human rights violations against Hindus are repeatedly ignored by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and government commissions like the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom that routinely fail to specifically highlight the plight of Hindus in regions where they comprise a minority.
• Minority and human rights commissions for Hindus in these regions must be created and / or empowered to pressure the governments of these countries to provide security and uphold the rights of minority Hindus.
• The international community must compel the governments of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India to respect the human rights of Hindus as an urgent priority.
Capt S B Tyagi, CSP, FISM, COAS’CC*
International Council of Industrial Security & Safety
111 – GAIL Society,
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Ph.No. 0120-2518345 Mobile. 9810660799
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“Difficult will be done right NOW, impossible may take a little longer.”
