Are Pakistani Hindus genuinely patriotic or they need to be for their survival in a country with 98% Muslim?
Separated by race and religion, Pakistanis are united only in their antipathy towards their giant neighbor.
According to a Persian saying, Multan was famous for four things: heat, dust, beggars and burial grounds. The latter were the magnificent tombs of various Sufis, or Islamic mystics. Legend has it that one Sufi deployed his miraculous powers to lure the sun closer to earth, thus creating Multan’s crippling heat. In the 4th century B.C., Alexander the Great swung through town on his world tour, almost dying there when an Indian spear punctured his lung. Seven hundred years later, a Chinese traveler found a mammoth Hindu temple in Multan. Not a brick of it survives today, although a tiny community of Hindus does.
They live in Railway Colony, an area near the station with crumbling brick houses and narrow, cobbled lanes. It is mainly inhabited by Christian descendants of rail workers employed during British rule. About 35 Hindus cluster among them, where they feel more secure (most Hindus in Punjab province fled over the border after partition). I watched as a small temple, shaded by a hallowed pipal tree, slowly filled up with worshipers. Inside was a tinsel-draped shrine loaded with votive fruit and smoldering incense. A sign above it read, “Om sweet om.”
Multan’s Hindus have many grievances—grievances echoed by Pakistani Christians I spoke to. Muslims are always favored when it comes to job offers or college places, they say. “We are poor—much poorer than the Muslims,” says Parwan Lal, a 20-year-old arts student. Yet Parwan and his friends claim they would not hesitate to defend Pakistan against any aggression from their Hindu brethren in India. “I’m a Pakistani first, and a Hindu second,” says Chaman Lal, 20, another student. “We will defend our motherland, just as Muslims in India would fight to defend their country against Pakistan.”
Was this simply the necessary patriotism of a minority, part of an embattled community’s highly-evolved instinct for survival? I’m sure it was heartfelt: even casual visitors are impressed by Pakistani patriotism. Yet Pakistanis seem to love their country without being particularly proud of it, a schizophrenic attitude they share with my compatriots, the English.