Hindus and Sikhs of the Pashtun lands: neighbours, traders and exiles

At a glance

• Hindu and Sikh families kept shops, lent money, kept accounts and practised medicine in Pashtun towns from Kabul and Kandahar to Peshawar and Bannu. [1–3]

• Where the state was weak, their safety rested on a tribe. They lived as hamsaya, "neighbours" in the old sense of clients of local tribesmen, and paid for the protection. [3]

• Sikh and Hindu children in Peshawar's Mohalla Jogan Shah shout at one another in Pashto, and Pashto-speaking Hindus from Balochistan are still a community in Jaipur. [10, 15]

• In 2009 the Taliban in lower Orakzai and Lashkar-e-Islam in Khyber demanded jizya from Sikhs and Hindus. Hundreds of families left for Peshawar. [6, 8, 9]

• In Afghanistan the community has shrunk from many thousands to a few hundred, after the exodus of the 1990s and attacks in Jalalabad on 1 July 2018 and at a Kabul gurdwara on 25 March 2020. [4, 5, 24]

• Peshawar's Gorakhnath temple reopened for worship in 2011. The shrine at Teri in Karak, burned by a mob on 30 December 2020, was rebuilt on the Supreme Court's order. [16, 20, 23]

Traders, bankers and physicians in Pashtun bazaars

Mountstuart Elphinstone, the East India Company's envoy to Kabul, wrote in his Account of the Kingdom of Caubul that Hindus were found "over the whole kingdom of Caubul". In towns they were "brokers, merchants, bankers, goldsmiths, sellers of grain", and there was scarcely a village without a family or two who kept accounts and changed money. [1] Elphinstone was a foreign officer, but his picture matches what historians of Afghanistan say now. Fabrizio Foschini of the Afghanistan Analysts Network writes that most Afghan Hindus and Sikhs were urban, working as traders, moneylenders and Ayurvedic physicians, some of them itinerant. [3]

After the Afghan state was founded in 1747, Foschini writes, a Hindu merchant class from Shikarpur in Sindh, the Shikarpuris, rose to the top of the regional economy as Ahmad Shah Durrani's Kandahar became the hub of trade between Iran, Central Asia and India. One gate of old Kandahar still bears the name of Shikarpur. [3] Hindus also served Afghan rulers as accountants and treasury officials, because, Foschini says, a non-Muslim had no chance of competing for power. [3]

In Bannu the same trade looked different from below. Thorburn's 1876 book on the district quotes Herbert Edwardes, the British officer who knew the valley before annexation. Edwardes wrote that all trade in Bannu was in Hindu hands, except gunpowder, firearms and swords, which only Muslims made and sold. [2] Thorburn himself recorded, among the Pashto proverbs of the district, a Marwat saying that "What is in deposit with a Hindoo, is in a grain-safe", and another that "The Pathan eats his enemy, the Hindoo his friend". Thorburn glossed the second as the Pathan's view that a Hindu would cheat his own parents for a rupee. [2]

Hamsaya: living under a tribe's protection

The Pashtun word for the arrangement is hamsaya, which means neighbour. Foschini says that in areas where the state was weak and tribal institutions strong, Hindus and Sikhs were protected as hamsaya, "clients of the local tribesmen", with bonds of loyalty handed down from one generation to the next. [3] They also paid. Non-Muslims owed the jizya, a poll tax that was sometimes counted per shop, and a hamsaya in a tribal area could be asked to share the extraordinary costs of the patron, such as a wedding. [3] The Pashtunwali article and the account of nanawatai describe the same bond among Muslims who took refuge with a malik.

Edwardes, again as Thorburn quotes him, describes the Bannu version in colonial words. Hindus could not leave a fort or visit another without a safeguard from their own Malik, who escorted them and was paid for it. No Hindu in Bannu was allowed a turban. [2] Edwardes was describing what he saw as an outsider who despised the system, and Thorburn adds that the Hindus of Bannu grew wealthy only after annexation, when the courts enforced their debts. [2] Elphinstone's Durrani Afghanistan offered a different bargain. Hindus were "allowed the free exercise of their religion", their temples "entirely unmolested", though processions and the public showing of idols were forbidden, and they paid a light tax from which Muslims were exempt. [1] Elphinstone also records a case at Peshawar in which a mullah, with some thousand mullahs behind him, forced the Durrani governor to order a Hindu circumcised on a charge, which Elphinstone presents as malicious, that he had embraced Islam and relapsed. [1] Protection held, but it was not unconditional.

Later accounts from inside the Pashtun lands give the custom in the words of the people who kept it. In Buner, where the Wali of Swat's state ruled, a villager of Pacha Kalay told the Express Tribune in 2018 that the Sikhs there were not allowed to buy property but "were guaranteed state protection and full freedom to trade". Another resident said: "The Sikhs are an integral part of society. They are held in great regard." [13] In Wana, a Christian elder named Manga Masih recalled that when Hindus and Sikhs left in 1947, "a jirga of the local Ahmadzai tribe had requested them to stay, and assured them of protection of their life, honour and property." The Hindus and Sikhs left anyway, he said, of their own free will,, and a malik said the tribesmen paid them for their land. [14] When violence came to the Pashtun lands, the custom did not always hold. Foschini records that during the unrest of 1929 the Shinwari of Peshbolak in Nangarhar sent a strong body of tribal police to escort their Hindu and Sikh hamsaya to Peshawar, which they reached safely with 17 copies of the Granth Sahib. [3] In the same civil war, he writes, the Hindu and Sikh communities near the frontier fell prey to tribes out looting under the cover of rebelling against Amanullah, and Frontier mullahs who had once praised Hindu-Muslim unity against the British came back to Lalpur, killed some Sikhs and Hindus, vandalised the gurdwara and the school and re-imposed the poll tax. [3]

Pashto-speaking Hindus and Sikhs

Elphinstone's Hindus of the Kabul kingdom had "got rid of many of their Hindoo prejudices" and mostly dressed like the country's people. [1] The community's languages in Peshawar and Buner come out of the same mixing. A Dawn reporter who walked through Peshawar's Mohalla Jogan Shah in 2014 saw Sikh boys, in shalwar kameez, "shouting at one another in Pushto", and heard Hakim Narender Singh say, after his brother's killing, "it is generally said that Sikhs and Pathans are almost the same". [10] Dawn also reported two Sikh schoolgirls from Orakzai, back from a camp in 2010, speaking Urdu "in a heavy Pushto accent". [9] The Buner Sikhs speak Hindko, with Punjabi and Pashto loan words, and know Pashto and Urdu as well. [13]

Partition scattered one Pashto-speaking Hindu community across the border. The Pashtun town of Mekhtar in Balochistan lost its Hindu families in 1947, and they settled in Jaipur as a community of about 400 with face tattoos for women, the Pashtun attan dance and clothes embroidered with coins. They still speak Pashto, says Shilpi Batra Adwani, a film-maker from one of the families. Malik Haji Paio Khan Kakar, 95 years old when Arab News met him in 2020, said: "When our Hindu friends were leaving us [after partition] they handed the keys of their shops to us". The shops have never been opened. [15]

1947 and after

Radesh Singh, who heads the council of Pakistan's Sikhs, told Voice of America in 2017 that his grandfather came to Peshawar from Indian Punjab in 1901 and stayed through 1947, and that the hostility after Partition was brief and was followed by decades of peace. [12] The memories of Mekhtar and Wana above come from the same years. [14, 15] Many gurdwaras the families left became government-held property, and VOA found Sikhs still contesting dozens of them in 2017. [12] The old city's Hindu and Sikh houses are described in Sethi House and the old houses of Peshawar.

Tirah, Orakzai and the jizya of 2009

Sikhs lived in lower Orakzai for centuries, in the Feroze Khel area, and in Tirah and Bara. [6, 8] Dawn's report datelined 29 April 2009 said that the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, led in Orakzai by Hakimullah Mehsud, had demolished 11 Sikh houses the night before, after a deadline for the jizya passed. The Taliban had told the Sikhs that sharia was now enforced and every non-Muslim owed protection money, and had seized the shops of two Sikh traders, Sewa Singh and Kalak Singh. [6] The sum is disputed. Dawn's first report said the Taliban asked for Rs150 million; a Dawn report on the Sikhs' return said their elders had met to discuss Rs15 million. [6, 9] Half the 160 elders refused to pay and chose to go to Shia-majority areas, the report says, and the others agreed to raise Rs10 million. [9] Dawn added on 1 May that the Sikhs of Kurram, Hangu, Kohat and Khyber had never been threatened by any group. [7]

Charan Singh was one of 56 families who spent twenty months in a tent camp in Kohat and Hangu after the Taliban looted their homes and shops. He returned in October, once the army had cleared most of Orakzai, which a Sikh elder dated to October 2010. [9] A Sikh elder told Dawn that the Taliban could not ask non-Muslims for jizya "in the presence of an elected government and fully functional tribal administration", and that the government's silence was criminal. [9] The same report says two Sikhs, Jaspal Singh and Mohan Singh, were kidnapped and beheaded, and that their bodies were found in Hangu. [9]

In Khyber, the demand came from Lashkar-e-Islam, led by Mangal Bagh. AFP reported in July 2009 that the tax was Rs1,000 per adult man a year. The Taliban had demanded it of adult Sikh men in Orakzai, and after two months it spread to Khyber, where Lashkar announced that Sikhs and Hindus could live anywhere if they paid. A Sikh leader on the Peshawar district assembly said his community paid Rs150,000 a year, and that the Sikh families in Bara had fallen from 500 to 150. Aman Deep Singh, who left a general store in Tirah for Peshawar, said about 400 Sikh and 57 Hindu families had left Bara and Tirah. [8] Misri Gul, a Lashkar spokesman, told AFP that "Jizya is according to sharia. We will provide them protection in exchange for this." AFP added that scholars say only a true Islamic government may collect the tax, and only if those who pay feel safe. [8]

Peshawar's Sikhs today

Most of Peshawar's Sikhs, about 6,000 in 2014 by Dawn's count, live around the Gurdwara Bhai Joga Singh in Mohalla Jogan Shah, in the Dabgari bazaar quarter, where the community runs a religious school. [10] In 2014 Dawn reported two Sikh hakims shot dead in two months in Charsadda district: Bhagwan Singh on 24 January and Pramjeet Singh in his clinic. A Shabqadar shopkeeper said Pramjeet Singh had treated them for 14 years, and most in the bazaar refused to name the killers. [10] Sangtok Singh, a computer science student at Peshawar University, said: "We have been confined to a city in KP and our ancestral land is now a no-go area." [10]

Dawn reported in April 2023 that Diyal Singh, who kept a herbal shop and had four children, had been shot dead. His grandfather had come from Tirah three decades earlier and settled at Kalanga in Bara, and he had moved to Mohalla Jogan Shah in May 2022, when two close relatives, Ranjeet Singh and Kulgeet Singh, were killed. Herjeet Singh, an imitation jewellery dealer, said a member of the minority was killed every seven or eight months, that 29 Sikh shopkeepers still ran shops in Bara and 19 in Bhatta Thal, all going home to Peshawar at night, and that the community was now talking of a mass move to Punjab. He also said that relations with the local community remained cordial. [11] Radesh Singh told VOA: "In a long time we have not heard any sweet sounds in our Peshawar, but still we love our city," he said. [12]

Kabul, Jalalabad and the attacks of 2018 and 2020

The numbers in Afghanistan vary widely. EASO's 2020 country report repeats estimates of about 700,000 Hindus and Sikhs in the 1970s and 220,000 in 1992. [5] AAN notes that the Indian embassy in Kabul gave about 100,000 for 1985 and about 2,000 for 2006. [4] The first exodus came in the early 1990s, when mujahideen factions fought for Kabul. After the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, some mullahs preached against Hindus and Sikhs, and families fled after attacks in Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar. [4]

On 1 July 2018 a suicide bomber hit a motorcade of Hindus and Sikhs in Jalalabad who were on their way to meet President Ashraf Ghani. The dead included Awtar Singh Khalsa, the community's only candidate for parliament, and 16 others. [4, 5] The Islamic State's Khorasan branch claimed it. [5]

At 7:45 on the morning of 25 March 2020 gunmen attacked the Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib in Shor Bazar, in Kabul's old city, at the hour when it hosts a session of prayers. [24] AAN counted 26 dead and 11 wounded, almost all Sikhs, including seven women and a six-year-old girl, and one Muslim man. [4] EASO and UNAMA's figures for the dead are 25 and 26. [5] The Islamic State claimed the attack and the Taliban denied it, and some government officials blamed the Haqqani network. AAN says the one attacker whose body was found has been identified as an Indian national from Kerala. [4] A blast near the crematorium during the funerals the next day hurt a child, AAN says, though RFE/RL reported that no one was hurt. [4, 5] Foschini adds that almost no Afghan government or political group has openly discriminated against the community. [4]

After 2021

After the Taliban took Kabul in August 2021, the Sikh gurdwara committee said it did not want to leave, according to the Anadolu report that the Express Tribune carried on 7 September. Some wanted to go to India. [25] In early October gunmen forced their way into the Karte Parwan gurdwara and vandalised it. [24] On 18 June 2022 the same gurdwara was attacked again. Reports at the time said two people were killed, one of them a Sikh, and seven were wounded, that a gun battle between the attackers and Taliban fighters lasted for hours, and that a Taliban fighter was shot dead in the crossfire. [26, 27]

AFP found in January 2022 that community figures put the Sikh population at 240 the year before and perhaps 140 now, most of them in Jalalabad and Kabul. Gurnam Singh said: "Afghanistan is our country, our homeland. But we are leaving out of sheer hopelessness." India has offered priority visas, but the pharmacist Manjit Singh refused: "What would I do in India?" [24]

Gorakhnath in Peshawar and Teri in Karak

The Gorakhnath temple stands in the Gor Khatri complex in the centre of Peshawar. On 15 September 2011 the Peshawar High Court, hearing a petition from Phool Wati, wife of the temple's pandit Kambhu Ram, ordered it opened for worship. The control of the site stayed with the government. [17] Dawn reported on 30 October that Hindus celebrated Diwali in it for the first time in ten years; the Express Tribune and Imam say it had been closed since 1947. [16–18] The archaeology department said a protected monument could not be handed to a private party, and the family's lawyer, Pervez Iqbal, said the keys were given for the festival only and had to be returned. [16, 17]

At Teri in Karak district stands the samadhi of Shri Paramhans Ji Maharaj, who died there and was buried in 1919. [19] Its followers visited until 1997, when it was damaged. The Express Tribune reported that the followers tried to rebuild on land held by a mufti although it belonged to the Auqaf department, and that Hindu elders from Sindh paid him Rs375,000 for it that year without getting it vacated. [19] On 16 April 2015 the Supreme Court told the province to restore the shrine, and on 5 May the province reported that the long dispute was settled on five conditions agreed by both communities: Hindus would not preach, would only pray, would not hold large gatherings, would not build a large prayer place and would not buy more land. Reconstruction began on those terms. [19]

On 30 December 2020 more than 1,000 people led by local elders of a religious party attacked and burned the shrine. [20] The police chief told the Supreme Court that Maulana Faizullah of the JUI-F had organised the protest and that, of six ulema present, only Maulvi Sharif had incited the crowd to desecrate the temple. Officials said 109 people were arrested and 92 police officers, including a superintendent and a deputy superintendent, were suspended. [20] On 5 January 2021 the court under Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed ordered the Evacuee Trust Property Board to rebuild the samadhi and to recover the cost from Maulvi Sharif and his followers. The Pakistan Hindu Council's Ramesh Kumar Vankwani said fairs were held there and 300 to 400 people visited every month. [20] In March 2021 local clerics and Hindu community members met in a jirga, according to a PTI report, and the Hindu side agreed to pardon the mob. The accused apologised for the attack and for the 1997 one, and the clerics promised protection. [22] The reconstruction was not smooth. On 31 March 2021 the court barred the Hindu community from interfering after Vankwani stopped the contractor, who he said lacked the expertise. He said the province had set aside Rs3.5 million when Rs50 million was needed. [21] On New Year's Day 2022 Hindu pilgrims from Dubai and India worshipped at the restored samadhi, and Radio Pakistan reported that the elders of Teri welcomed them and opened the village hujras for their stay. [23] A hujra is a Pashtun village's guest house.

Related reading: Jalalabad, religion among Pashtuns, Shia Pashtuns, Tirah and Afghanistan and the Pashtun lands since 2021.