Saga of the capital’s Hindu temple: Will it be built?
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Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, has hundreds of mosques, a few churches for Christians but no temples for Hindus or Gurdwaras for Sikhs.
Until the partition of 1947, these two religious communities had a sizeable population and dominated the urban, business and commercial life of nearby Rawalpindi city. This major city in northern Punjab and a cantonment represented the religious and cultural pluralism of undivided India then.
As the Sikhs and Hindus left in the wake of communal violence, their properties, businesses and places of worship were taken over by incoming Muslim refugees. Not many of their places of worship have survived the greed of land grabbers, though these are protected under the law. One can still see a few temples and gurdwaras around, but in very poor condition.
One of the villages in Islamabad, Saidpur, at the foothills of the lush green Margalla Mountains has an old temple that got renovated about a decade back. It is too small for any religious service. A Hindu religious school attached to it now serves as a museum to tell the story of the development of Pakistan’s capital.
Members of the Hindu and Sikh community owned some of the agricultural lands where the site for Islamabad was selected, but they had left everything behind more than two decades before the foundation stone for the new city was laid down.
The Hindu community remained too small to be visible, primarily engaged in business, and with very few in government jobs. In recent years, militancy and violence in the adjacent regions has driven many families, mostly well to do, to settle in Islamabad for its peaceful environment. The influx also brought with it a few thousand members of the Hindu community to the capital.
The Hindu Panchayat or association of Islamabad for years has demanded the construction of a temple for worship, and with it a crematorium for its dead. There is only one “Shri Krishna Mandir” in downtown Rawalpindi where every family from Islamabad has to travel for religious ceremonies.
Will Khan stand his ground against the objectors on this issue? Only time will tell. Under pressure, he has already decided to refer the matter for advice to the Council of Islamic Ideology, a government funded agency, and CDA has stopped construction of a boundary wall on the pretext that building plans have yet to be approved.
Rasul Bakhsh Rais
Mr. Ramesh Lal, a parliamentarian on a reserved seat for minorities, was the first to raise the demand for the construction of a Hindu temple in the city. On his request, a parliamentary committee on human rights passed a resolution in July 2016, directing the government to build a temple and a crematorium for Hindus. In October that year, the Capital Development Authority (CDA) earmarked half an acre of land for this purpose adjacent to a piece of land allotted in sector H-9. Two years later, in 2018, the federal ministry of human rights got a piece of land formally allocated for the temple. But the project never got off the ground.
The members of the Islamabad Hindu Panchayat met with Prime Minister Imran Khan in the company of minister for religious affairs and requested him to grant funds for building the temple on June 26.
Khan acted very promptly on the request and informally approved Rs100 million from the public exchequer for the temple. He has been quite vocal on the issue of religious harmony and the protection of minority rights.
One of the remarkable things he did early on in his tenure was the construction of a visa-free corridor for pilgrims from India to the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib, a few kilometers inside Pakistan from the border. This Gurdwara is considered as one of the holiest shrines by Sikhs and is visited by thousands of Sikhs from all over the world. Building a corridor fulfilled a longstanding demand of the Sikh community, a move that earned Khan praise at home and abroad.
It was in the same spirit that he approved funds for the construction of the Hindu temple. But this has kicked up a political storm among some of religious factions vowing they will “not allow the construction of temples in Islamabad.”
Some opportunist politicians, interestingly members of Khan’s governing coalitions, have also made some noise saying the construction of temple is “against the ideology of Pakistan.”
Will Khan stand his ground against the objectors on this issue? Only time will tell. Under pressure, he has already decided to refer the matter for advice to the Council of Islamic Ideology, a government funded agency, and CDA has stopped construction of a boundary wall on the pretext that the building plans have yet to be approved.
The panchayat has already performed the stone-laying ceremony for the new Shri Krishna Mandir, the first temple complex in the capital.
Severe reactions from fringe communalist elements is understandable, but what is not understandable is Khan taking the cover of the Ideology Council after making a commitment to the Hindu community.
Nobody can be sure if he will stand by his word and protect the constitutional rights of Hindus— equality and religious freedom.
*Rasul Bakhsh Rais is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS, Lahore. His latest book is “Islam, Ethnicity and Power Politics: Constructing Pakistan’s National Identity” (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Twitter: @RasulRais
