MILPITAS, Calif. — Three activists drew horrific pictures of the predicament of Hindu minorities, sometimes backed by poignant video presentations, in far-flung parts of the world at the Hindu Human Rights Forum hosted at the Vaishnav Mandir here July 20. Hosted by the Hindu American Foundation, speakers talked about the plight of Hindus in Kashmir, Malaysia and Fiji. HAF also presented its recently released fourth annual human rights report, “Hindus in South Asia and the Diaspora.”
The plight of evicted Kashmiri Pandits, and Hindus in Fiji and Malaysia was highlighted by impassioned presentations by Jeevan Zutshi, a Bay Area community activist and Kashmiri Pandit himself; southern California-based engineer and Malaysian Tamil human rights activist Bhuvan Govindasamy; and San Francisco Bay Area-based attorney of Fiji Indian descent Sadhana D. Narayan.
The statistics are staggering: An estimated 350,000 Kashmiri Pandits have been hounded out of their homeland in the Kashmir valley; and Malaysia’s egregious discriminatory policies have resulted in a drop of Indian-descent student enrollment in Malaysian universities from 20 percent in 1957 to just five percent in 2003. In Fiji, harassment and discrimination has led to an exodus of Fiji Indians: From around half the population in the 1970s, the Fiji Indian population has dropped to 38 percent in 2004.
To be sure, only in Kashmir can it be argued that Pandits have been targeted because of their religion. In Malaysia and Fiji, Hindus have been part of a broader, xenophobic attack against immigrants. Malaysia’s decades-long troubled race relations led to Singapore leaving the Malay federation and a Chinese guerilla insurgency, while in Fiji, the plight of Hindus has been driven by the schism between indigenous Fijians and Indians who immigrated in the 19th century, a point made by Narayan. (more…)
