Systematic brainwashing of Pak since last 70 years : World Sindhi Congress Chief
The chairperson of the World Sindhi Congress has accused the Pakistani establishment of not protecting minorities and allowing them to be systematically targeted.
Rubina Greenwood, a human rights activist and chairperson of World Sindhi Congress, in an exclusive interview to ANI, said the Pakistan Army was systematically breaking the Sindhi community using political tools and brute force, while forcing them to migrate.
Atrocities on the ethnic minorities in Pakistan have risen in the recent past, according to reports.
In a recent incident that shook the world, a 150-year-old Mari Mata temple in Karachi was razed to the ground. The temple had been the target of land grabbers and developers for years, according to reports.
Another temple in the Kashmore area of the country’s Sindh province was attacked on the same day with rocket launchers, reports said.
According to Greenwood, minorities in Pakistan are purportedly subjected to inhumane political and public attitudes. They are often at the receiving end of “policy exclusivity and mob aggression”.
“Some say Pakistan has become a rabid fundamentalist state where the government is accused of both omission and commission,” she said.
Greenwood added, “Unfortunately, the reality is that yes Pakistan has become very, radical towards its minority. I don’t whether people over the 70 years of systematic brainwashing of our people and the education system, the culture has actually changed the outlook of the country, and the outlook of the people as well. But we need to fundamentally understand that, the whole political thinking and the institutionalization of Pakistan as well.”
She added, “Pakistan was built as a Puritan state. Puritan state means that a state can actually use religion to control the people, the mindset, the growth and the whole thinking about the thinking of the people can be controlled by the religion. They have changed the whole county’s mindset through the education system and by their cultural mindset. The people of Sindh, Punjab are secular. They are not hostile people. It is the 70 years of institutionalisation that has had an impact on the mindset of the people.”
Greenwood stated further, “The suppression of minorities has a two-fold effect — to take control of the country and take control of the people and their progress. So it is a tool to create hate within the people. The people engage in civil wars or civil issues and forget about the bigger and the strategic issues to which they need to pay attention.”
“They want to create this instability in Sindh because it is one of the most secular provinces in Pakistan,” she added.
On the impact of propaganda tools on people, Greenwood said, “Sindh has a secular culture and they have a strong sentiment of nationhood, considering Sindhis as one nation. We have Sindhi Hindus, Sindhi Jains, Sindhi Sikhs and Sindhi Muslims. So, if they create religious rivalry and religious discrimination they can actually control Sindh and suppress Sindh’s nationalist sentiment. Pakistan’s military is using a political weapon to take control of Sindh. This is to divide our community and weaken our community. And we have seen in recent years how much the Sindhi Hindus have migrated. The ploy is to push back Sindhi Hindus so that we become minorities in our own region. There is a lot of social and demographic engineering happening in Sindh. And they are victimising our Sindhi Hindus.”
