By Brian Wheeler, Political reporter The right to settle in Britain should be auctioned off to wealthy foreign investors, government advisers say. At present migrants can gain entry by investing £1m or more in the UK. Read more » BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26334978
Tag Archives: migration
The painful plight of native Sindhi Hindu community – Forced migration of native children of Sindh
By: Iqbal Tareen
The painful plight of native Sindhi Hindu community, which has been under systematic onslaught of government agencies, criminal groups, decadent sardari system and violent clan groups in Sindh. Decades of religious extremism; collapse of judiciary and law enforcement agencies; criminalization and commercialization of political parties in the country especially in Sindh has created an environment where various religious, gender, and ethnic minority groups are thrown under serious vulnerability.
Although it is an unequivocal responsibility of State to safeguard life and property of every citizen but it does not relieve other individuals, groups, and institutions from their moral obligation to fight social injustice and discrimination.
In times when even advanced nations are actively alluring global talent, the most peaceful, law abiding, hardworking, highly skilled and entrepreneurial native children of Sindh are being forced to leave their
motherland just because they happen to be part of a very successful but defenseless community.
We could easily blame others but ultimate responsibility rests with us at the individual and collective level. By sitting on the sidelines or not doing enough we have allowed uprooting of hundreds and thousands of our
best and brightest native brothers and sisters. Unforgiveable failings of human rights and Sindh rights organizations compounded by our individual dereliction of moral duty have created a severe moral crisis of our collective consciousness.
At personal level, I feel guilty of my failure to bring this issue to the front burner of a public discourse within North American Diaspora. Having said that, I am not ready to lose my faith in the basic goodness of human
beings. Together we can still prevent further perpetration of this collective crime against a peaceful community in Sindh.
I hope members of Pakistani media, civil society and Pakistani Diaspora organizations will follow lead in exposing those individuals and groups who are behind religious cleansing of minority groups in Pakistan.
I assure you of my personal efforts in solidarity with the just and moral cause of our Sindhi Hindu brothers and sisters in Pakistan.
About – The writer is a President of Silver Lining International, author of books, rights activist and former president of Sindhi Association of North America.
Courtesy: Sindhi e-lists/ e-groups, August 12-13, 2012.
Support SAPAC efforts against the Plight of Sindhi Hindus in Pakistan
(Washington, DC:) [Press release] The Sindhi American Political Action Committee (SAPAC) has taken serious notice of the current conspiracies against Sindhi Hindus in Pakistan. The situation has worsen further, thousands of Sindhi Hindus are migrating from Pakistan to India.
The lives of Sindhi Hindus are in danger, worship places are being converted into toilets and garages and properties are not safe. Continuous harassment, bonded labour, kidnapping, ransom, enforced conversions, enforced migration has become a routine activity in Sindhi society.
The continuous growth of illegal Muslim fanatic people from different parts of Pakistan and other countries can be traced in Sindh.
The Muslim fundamentalism is growing and society is in chaos and mayhem. The state of Pakistan has failed to protect Sindhi Hindus. The small minority of Sindhi Muslims is also involved in atrocious acts against Sindhi Hindus. There are many leaders and parties who are just giving statements and making committees although the issue is bigger than mere statements and committees. It needs actions.
This issue must be taken to International Criminal Court. The United Nations must take immediate action for the Protection of Indigenous Sindhi Hindus in Pakistan.
The Sindhi Hindus are indigenous people of Sindh. They are peaceful, law-abiding, and original Sindhis of Sindh.
SAPAC has always raised the awareness in US Congress about atrocities faced by Sindhi Hindus. SAPAC is organizing two-day advocacy campaign on September 11 and 12 at Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. We encourage you to support SAPAC in these efforts against the plight of Sindhi Hindus in Pakistan.
Migration not solution for Sindhi Hindus
By: Kapil Dev
Some 65 years ago, Muhammad Ali Jinnah made a historic speech to the first Constituent Assembly, which was being presided over by none other than a scheduled caste Hindu, Jogendra Nath Mandal, also the first law minister of Pakistan, which many of us perhaps don’t know. Jinnah’s words ‘You are free; you are free to go your worship places. You may belong to any religion or cast or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state’ often reverberate in our ears on this day. It won’t be wrong to say that a person belonging to religious minority, be it a Christian, Hindu or Parsi, has crammed these historic words just to quote and justify their existence here and they rightly do so. In fact these words are an epitome of Jinnah’s vision of secular Pakistan which was hijacked soon after his death by right wing mullahs.
Manto and Sindh – Excellent write up of Haider Nizamani, it helps to understand why Sindh is tolerant and secular society in nature.
Manto and Sindh
By Haider Nizamani
SINDH has no equivalent of Saadat Hasan Manto as a chronicler of Partition. And the absence of a Manto-like figure in Sindhi literature on that count is good news. It shows the resilience of Sindh’s tolerant culture at a time when Punjab had slipped into fratricidal mayhem.
While Amrita Pritam called out for Waris Shah to rise up from the grave to witness the blood-drenched rivers of Punjab, Sindhi woman writers such as Sundari Uttamchandani were not forced to ask Shah Latif to do the same.
The tragedy of Partition inflicted different types of pain on the Punjabi and Sindhi communities and these peculiarities shadowed and shaped post-Partition communal relations between people of different faiths who traced their roots to these regions. What Manto endured and witnessed in 1947 and afterwards, became, through his eloquent writings, simultaneously an elegy and indictment of Punjab losing its sense of humanity at the altar of religious politics. The political air in Sindh was filled with religious demagogy but it did not turn into a communal orgy.
Urdu literati and historians interested in Partition and its impact on the subcontinent have used Manto’s birth centennial, that was recently observed, to remind us of his scathing sketches of lives destroyed by Partition. Ayesha Jalal in her essay ‘He wrote what he saw — and took no sides’ published in the May issue of Herald, writes Manto “looked into the inner recesses of human nature…” to “fathom the murderous hatred that erupted with such devastating effect” …in “his own home province of Punjab at the dawn of a long-awaited freedom”.
There was no eruption of murderous hatred between Sindhi Hindus and Muslims. They did not lynch each other en masse as was the case in Punjab. The violence against Sindhi Hindus and their mass migration to India was a tragic loss scripted, orchestrated and implemented by non-Sindhis in Sindh. As result of varying trajectories of interfaith relations during the Partition period, the intelligentsia of Sindh and Punjab evolved and adopted different views towards Hindus and India.
The collective memory of the Partition days in Punjab is marked more by the stories and silence of the victims and perpetrators of violence. Even the journey towards the safer side was fraught with danger. People who survived had bitter memories of the ‘other’.
The Sindh story is not the same. Ram Jethmalani, a leading lawyer in India today and a member of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was a young advocate in Karachi in 1947. His senior partner was none other than A.K. Brohi, a right-wing Sindhi lawyer who became federal law minister during the Zia period.
Jethmalani has no compunction in saying that there was no love lost between the two because of Partition. Jethmalani stayed back in Karachi and only left for Mumbai in 1948 when Brohi told him he could not take responsibility for his safety as the demography of Karachi had changed with the arrival of migrants from the northern Indian plains. That arrival was accompanied by violence against Sindhi Hindus.
Kirat Babani, a card-carrying communist, chose to stay in Sindh after 1947 and was thrown in prison in 1948. Released 11 months on the condition of leaving Karachi within 24 hours, Kirat took up a job with Comrade Hyder Bux Jatoi, pioneer of the peasant struggle in Sindh. The administration pressured Jatoi for harbouring an atheist. Jatoi advised, much against his desire, Kirat to go to India. Even the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that groomed L.K. Advani, a native of Karachi who later became India’s deputy prime minister, acknowledges that Sindhi Muslims did not push Hindus out of the province.
Karachi: a Tower of Babel? By Roland DeSouza
Excerpt;
…. Over the next three censuses, the proportion of Urdu speakers in the city peaked at over 50 per cent but the Pashto speakers slowly began to increase. In the 1998 census, in a population of 9.8 million, the Urdu speakers showed a declining trend of around 45 per cent while the Pashto speakers moved upwards to ten per cent.
Projecting these trend lines into the future, in less than thirty years the number of Pashto speakers will exceed the number of Urdu speakers. ….
Read more » The Express Tribune
http://tribune.com.pk/story/365643/karachi-a-tower-of-babel/
Pak Hindus request Indian citizenship
600 Pakistani Hindu visiting families request Indian Government for long term visas and citizenship
Read more → YahooNews
States formed on the basis of religion can never survive a peaceful future (Bertrand Russell) e.g; Pakistan and Israel!
Pakistan’s identity war — II
By Saleem H Ali
What does it mean to be an Islamic state? Was there ever such an entity? Can modernity, as it pertains to developing a functional society in a globalised world, be realised within the context of a theocracy? These are fundamental questions which Pakistanis need to resolve, within this generation, in order for Pakistan to develop and reach its potential.
Pakistan shares the distinction, along with Israel, as being one of only two states to have been crafted, in the post-colonial worlds, on the basis of religion. In both cases enormous migrations were involved with questionable legitimacy for the migrants. The ‘muhajir’ identity continues to be perpetuated, as such, on this basis. The creation of both Israel and Pakistan present a perplexing paradox: Created on the basis of religion, their champions were largely secular individuals. The founders of Zionism as a political force, such as Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, were secular. So too were Pakistan’s founders, most notably the Quaid-i-Azam. I would argue that Ben Gurion and Jinnah made a dangerous bargain when it came to conflating cultural identity on the basis of religious adherence.
Pakistan and Israel — two states which don’t recognise each other diplomatically — are facing a similar radicalisation because of that initial crisis of identity which was never fully resolved. Theocratic forces are gaining power in both countries. …
Read more : The Express Tribune
If the situation is not checked very quickly, someone may soon write an epitaph of Pakistan
Pakistan: A country created & being destroyed in the name of religion
by Aziz Narejo
It was not long ago when some Indian Muslim leaders had gathered in Lahore and had adopted a resolution at their meeting to demand a brand new country in the name of religion. They systematically created a mass frenzy in the support of their demand and finally achieved what they wanted – ‘a brand new country in the name of religion’. It was born in a pool of blood and was accompanied by the misery and the mass migration on a scale never seen before in the Sub-Continent.
But creating hysteria and dividing population in the name of religion was very easy compared to running and managing a new country. The leadership failed at all levels – and in all sections of the society. The rot started early. They couldn’t bring the country to the people. Couldn’t keep it together. Couldn’t agree on a Constitution or a form of government. First it was Mullahs, feudals and bureaucrats. They were soon joined by the military, which lost no time to enslave everybody else. It became the ‘praetorian masters’, the ‘powers that be’ and the ‘establishment’. The military became the ultimate master of the destiny of the country.
To stop the people from getting their due rights, the establishment created a fake ‘ideology of Pakistan’. When pressed to accept demands of the people, especially from the eastern wing and the smaller provinces, it first created One Unit and then encouraged the rightists to fight the progressive elements and the people of various nationalities demanding their rights. The religious right and the establishment would readily dub them unpatriotic, anti-state, anti-Islam and enemies of the country.
What was the result? They lost half of the country in just 24 years. They still didn’t learn. Created some more monsters in the name of religion and ethnicity. Today everything seems out of control. The rightist groups, which were supported in the name of religion to fight the nationalist and progressive elements in the country and to wage proxy wars on the borders and in India and Afghanistan, have started working on their own agenda. They now think they are in a position to claim the whole pie – ‘why settle for less’?
These groups hold the whole country hostage now. They have made the governance impossible and the country is fast moving to complete anarchy. The establishment still seems to be oblivious of where these groups may take the country and what havoc they may create. It still supports part of these groups considering them as its ‘strategic assets’.
Along with the establishment, some in media and other sections of the society have also developed soft corner for the rightist groups. They think that country could be brought together in the name of religion, which can actually never happen. Religion as it is today can only further divide an already divided country. It may create some more fissures and chaos. Most of the religious groups and parties are at loggerheads with each other and frequently issue edicts dubbing the followers of rival sects as infidels and liable to be eliminated.
Country is clearly on a path to self-destruction. Many of the people would still not realize the seriousness of the situation. They are in the constant state of denial and blame every misfortune either on America or India ….
Read more : Indus Herald
The Sindhi society is not a hate society that dislikes others. Their opposition to mass migration towards Sindh is due to their natural desire to survive as a nation in their historic land
Washington Sindhis Get-together with Nazir Essani and Discussion on Sindhi Challenges
by: Khalid Hashmani
On June 12, 2009, several members of Sindhi community of the Washington D.C. area had a get-together with a visiting Sindhi Social Development consultant Mr. Nazir Essani at a local restaurant. Apart from customary introductions, the group had an excellent discussion session about the current situation in Sindh and the challenges that must be met by Sindhis to survive as a nation. Those who participated in the discussion included Nazir Jawaid Bhutto, Essani, Khalid Hashmani, Ali Nawaz Memon, Sarfraz Memon, Hanif Sangi, Aijaz Sindhi, and Iqbal Tareen.
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