70 years after Pakistan-India split, Sikhs search for home
PESHAWAR:Radesh Singh’s grandfather was just 11 when he left his village in India’s Punjab to move to Peshawar, in the far northwest of Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan.
The year was 1901, the British ruled the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan wasn’t even a glimmer in the eye of its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and Peshawar held the promise of work and adventure.
Singh’s grandfather would never return to his village, not even in 1947, when the Indian subcontinent was divided into majority Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, generating one of the largest migrations in modern history and unleashing a brutality that left a few untouched as mobs of Hindus and Muslims turned on each other.
Singh’s family is neither Hindu nor Muslim but Sikh, a religious minority in both countries. They have felt increasingly less at home on either side of the border, but particularly so in recent years in overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan as they too have become victims of local Taliban violence.
Singh said poverty kept his grandfather in Peshawar, located at the foot of the famed Khyber Pass and dominated by fiercely independent ethnic Pashtun tribesmen.
“It’s not easy to start over at zero when you have very little,” he said.
The hostility in the immediate aftermath of 1947 was brief in the northwest, said Singh. It was followed by decades of peace.
The decision to stay in the new country now called Pakistan seemed like a good choice at the time.
The Sikhs had lived peacefully for centuries alongside their Pashtun Muslim countrymen.
Today Sikhs are among Pakistan’s smallest minorities. They are easily identifiable because of their tightly wound and often colourful turbans, and because they share the surname Singh. The CIA Factbook estimates that 3.6% of Pakistan’s 180 million people are non-Muslims, including Sikhs, Christians and Hindus.
Until 1984, Singh said, Pakistan’s Hindus and Sikhs lived as one in northwest Pakistan. Their children married, they even worshipped together. But then India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards.
“They (Hindus) cut all relations with us. They said Pakistani Sikhs are like all Sikhs everywhere. No difference. They said: from now on, we will be separate from you,” Singh recalled.
Today, Sikhs are battling with the Pakistan government for ownership of dozens of Sikh temples or gurdwaras, while it is slow going they have managed to reclaim some of the buildings. Many were abandoned in 1947 and taken over by Muslims who arrived from India.
The Pakistan government, which took over the buildings after 1947, allowed the squatters to remain.