PPP lawmaker’s wailing over Hindu girl’s plight

Nusrat Javeed.

Our National Assembly had been feeling so good, great and proud about itself after declaring Malala Yousafzai a “Daughter of Pakistan” through a unanimously passed resolution Monday evening.

Exactly the morning after, though, a weighty PPP legislator from Sindh, Nawab Yousaf Talpur, stood in the same house to wail over the sad story of a girl child from the Hindu community of his province.

He did name the child and also explained that she belonged to a family of “scheduled (low) caste,” but refrained from explaining as to what had really happened to her. He just reported that “this 6-year-old had perhaps suffered more misery than Malala.”

The said girl, he went on, lived in a village of District Umerkot that is represented by another very elitist PPP veteran, Pir Aftab Shah.

Yousaf Talpur claimed that the local administration has preferred to look the other way, instead of providing any legal and medical help to the victim, but thanks to diligent efforts by him and Pir Aftab none other than the Chief Minister took notice of the incident. He appointed a senior police official of good repute to conduct exhaustive investigation of the matter.

From the suggestive remarks cautiously made by Nawab Talpur, one could safely presume that the minor girl from a wretched caste had been sexually assaulted, probably with the intent of “teaching some lesson” to her family. One felt doubly upset, when Talpur went on to reveal that with apparent connivance of local notables, the police in Hindu-majority Umerkot habitually implicate citizens from scheduled caste in false cases.

“I fail to reconcile with the sad fact that such a practice is permitted under a PPP government, which always provided support to the downtrodden, especially minorities from lower castes,” confessed Nawab Talpur before demanding from the chair to form a special committee of the National Assembly to regularly monitor the state of minorities in Sindh. Not one member from either side of the House stood to support the cause Talpur had promoted. In fact hardly a person was seen listening to him.

Incidentally, it was not for the first time that one heard shockingly depressing stories that project the dismal state of Hindu community in Sindh these days. Such stories mostly focus on kidnapping of affluent persons for ransom, however.

Some months ago, a sister of President Zardari and the daughter of Chief Minister Sindh loudly agitated over the alleged ‘kidnapping’ of a Hindu girl, who eventually reported to have ‘embraced Islam’ and went under the protective wings of another PPP member of the National Assembly from Ghotki. When confronted by this correspondent, the said member, Mian Abdul Haq of Bhirchondi Shareef, proudly owned “provision of shelter” to that girl, “who being an adult had decided to embrace Islam by her free will and marry a Muslim.”

He also defended his conduct while speaking on the issue in the National Assembly and later told me that Sindhi media, which he alleged, was “pampered by affluent Hindus of upper caste” just creates “unnecessary hype if a Hindu girl marries a Muslim after embracing Islam.” He also claimed that on average “30 to 40 Hindu males of scheduled caste embrace Islam at the shrine that I am the custodian of in Ghotki every Friday, but no one cares talking about that.”

Although not questioning the credibility of Nawab Talpur, I am forced to insist that his mother party, the PPP, does not identify with dejected state of the wretched of this earth anymore. According to his own statement, the Chief Minister only moved when two weighty members of the National Assembly from his own party approached him for helping a 6-year-old from Umerkot. There must be hundreds of such cases that Qaim Ali Shah is simply ignorant of.

Simply put, the sad story of the 6-year-old rather shows that in spite of heading the Sindh government for more than four years, the Syed from Khairpur failed in establishing some semblance of good governance in his domain. Vast swaths of areas in his part of North Sindh have rather been taken over by Mullahs of hard right. Some of their followers had even targeted with bullets a public meeting in Khairpur that was to be addressed by his journalist-turned-human rights activist daughter, Nafisa Shah, some weeks ago.

Instead of feeling alarmed by this fast increasing trend Asif Ali Zardari is found cultivating the usual tribal sardars and decadently feudal ‘notables’ of North Sindh to ensure winning of the next election. It’s time that a seasoned politician like Nawab Talpur wakes up to the ‘new face’ of his party.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 12^th, 2012.