A Hindu trader was brutally gunned down in Balochistan and the remaining traders are receiving death threats from Islamists

The condition of minority communities in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan hardly needs any introduction. Simply due to them being non-Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christian and other communities are persecuted in Pakistan. In a shocking development, a Hindu trader in Balochistan named Ashok Kumar was recently gunned down by Islamists after he reportedly denied paying them extortion money. The Islamists opened fire at the Hindu trader last week in the Wadh market in the Khuzdar district. In the aftermath of Kumar’s brutal killing, all remaining Hindu traders in the area are being threatened by the Islamist thugs.

According to the Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune, unidentified men affixed pamphlets in the market and on signboards of the National Highway on Saturday in which they threatened the local Hindu traders of serious consequences, if they allowed female customers to enter their shops. The Hindu traders, however, are not allowing the threats of Islamists to scare them.

Instead, they are standing up to the normalization of discrimination and religious apartheid in Pakistan. Protesting against the pace of the investigation process and threatening pamphlets, members of the trader association and workers of Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNP-M) blocked the National Highway on Saturday. Also, according to Amar Ujala, in protest of the killing of Ashok Kumar, the area’s traders pulled their shutters down and put up barricades, thereby blockading a national highway.

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, as per a report by ANI, the Hindus of Pakistan were being starved to death in the Islamic country. Thousands of poor and needy people had gathered in the Rehri Ghoth area of Karachi to receive food and essential supplies in March last year, as their wages were been hurt due to Coronavirus lockdown. But the Hindus of the area were turned away by both NGOs and local administration as they happened to be Hindu.

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Turning away people for food just because they happen to be from another religion could happen only in a country like Pakistan and this could be only expected from adherents of Islam. And this is the reason that the Union government must update the cut-off date of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act to provide citizenship to Hindus of countries like Pakistan who want to migrate to India.

The idea of Pakistan – a fantasy of educated Muslims of Northern India- was forced on the minorities living on the people living in Bengal and Western provinces of British India. These people had not chosen their destiny, as those were times of limited franchise – in which only rich and educated Men (Women were not allowed to vote in British India), constituting less than 10 per cent of the total population were allowed to vote. The minorities of Pakistan are now bearing the brunt of the communal fantasies of Islamists in India who voted for the Muslim League in the provincial elections prior to the partition.