Propaganda That Pakistan Hindus Are Disillusioned By CAA Is Just That – Propaganda

About three months ago, 11 Bheel refugees from Pakistan committed mass suicide due to domestic infighting in Dhechu , Jodhpur.

We at Nimittekam, which focuses on Hindu refugees from Pakistan, dispatched our Jodhpur district coordinator, Bhag Chand Bheel, to Dhechu village and he reported back that the whole thing was an unfortunate culmination of internal discord in the family.

The state police too could not find any criminal angle in this suicide.

The only man of the family who was left alive, Keva Ram Bheel, gave a statement to the police that this tragedy happened due to family infighting and had nothing to do with government apathy to their plight.

And yet, how did this suicide play out in Bharat and overseas?

Media in India went out of the way to make it look like mass murder or suicide due to official apathy towards Hindu refugees from Pakistan. Even a criminal angle was suggested.

A so-called activist, whom I choose not to name, gave interviews to various media outlets from Jodhpur and blamed the administration for these deaths.

The Pakistani media lapped up these lies and launched a propaganda blast suggesting that Pakistani Hindu refugees are not safe in India. The Pakistani Hindu Council, misled by this propaganda, made a hue and cry about it and even demonstrated outside Indian High Commission.

A stray incident was used as a tool to malign the work of the government of India and send a message to Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan that it was no use looking towards the Indian state or Indian people for a safer and better future in India.

And then Covid-19 happened. Thanks to new restrictions on the movement of people across the border, our embassies and the borders have been shut down since March 2020. As a result, more than 2,000 Hindu families have converted to Islam in Sindh and Punjab provinces of Pakistan.

Hindus who had been standing for the faith of their ancestors against the worst kind of atrocities by Islamists were forced to yield and had to surrender their faith.

While no one can deny the reality of Covid’s impact on the movement of persecuted Hindus to India, the Indian media needs to stand guard against the efforts of Islamists and their “secular” allies to malign the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the hard work put in by organisations like Nimittekam to extricate Hindus and Sikhs from their nemesis in Pakistan.

The net result of the failure to separate propaganda from fact, especially on the unfortunate deaths of the Bheels, has led to some despondency among the 1 crore Hindus and Sikhs of Pakistan, giving a bad name to the Indian government which offered them a ray of hope through CAA. This failure can only lead to more conversions of Hindus to Islam.

Working for the last 10 years with the Indian Union and state governments, I can vouch for the fact that the only approach to Pakistani Hindu issues has been one of extreme compassion and concern.

Even the much-maligned Indian bureaucracy has been very helpful and went out of its way to accommodate these unfortunate Hindus of Pakistan.

Just when the dust around the Dhechu suicides was settling, we got another news heading from a newspaper and the whole Leftist ecosystem went radioactive. This time it was news about 243 Hindus and Sikhs of Pakistan going back to their country. The article maliciously linked this return of Pakistani citizens to non-implementation of the CAA.

Here are the facts.

First, these Hindus were not officially refugees in India but had overstayed in India due to the shutdown of travel after Covid, they were Pakistani citizens who were here on visit visas or religious visas and they had to go back.

Second, the process of granting refugee status to a Hindu or Sikh from Pakistan is clearly laid out by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). Briefly, it requires an Indian citizen to sponsor a Pakistani Hindu, the application is then vetted by the security agencies of India and then a visa is granted by the Indian embassy in Islamabad. None of these people mentioned in the article belong to this category.

Third, every Pakistani citizen is potentially a security risk for India. We can never be sure when a jihadi will masquerade as a Hindu and enter India to wreak havoc on our society. Not only could this lead to a terror attack, but it can also give a very bad name to 1 crore Hindus trapped inside Pakistan, making their ultimate exit from that hell difficult.

If officials of the MHA want to send these Pakistanis back, they must have their solid reasons.

Fourth, there are myopic and self-absorbed people in Jodhpur who are milking this issue of Pakistani Hindus to further their Leftist, anarchist agendas.

Fifth, the CAA has no role in this situation because CAA is only applicable to refugees who entered India prior to 31 December 2014, and it applies only to legal refugees.

The consequences of allowing this noise surrounding Pakistani Hindus to percolate in the media can only be more persecution and conversions of Hindus in that Islamic state.

If the same Leftists who were egging on the Shaheen Bagh protests are now shedding crocodile tears for Hindus of Pakistan, it can only mean one thing: the idea is to malign the Narendra Modi government and create fissures within the Hindu community.

Few people in the Indian media write about the horrors that Hindus and Sikhs face in Pakistan every day.

Even fewer report on the fact of three Hindu or Sikh girls get picked up from their homes daily and are forcibly converted.

Newspapers seldom write about the exemplary work being done by Indian organisations to rehabilitate these forgotten Hindus of Pakistan. NGOs and ashrams like the Sadhani Darbar of Raipur are housing thousands of these refugees in India.

The Left-secular cabal which cried itself hoarse over CAA is not seeking to damage it by saying it is not being implemented. Hypocrisy knows no bounds.

The Hindu Right needs to see through this game played by the Left which is intended to sow the seeds of doubt in the community.

The author is a founder of Nimittekam, and organisation devoted to help persecuted Pakistani Hindus and Sikhs resettle in India.