Temple school in Pak where Muslim woman teaches Hindu students
Karachi: Inside a Hindu temple in a shanty area in Pakistan’s Karachi city, Anum Agha wearing the traditional Muslim Hijab greets her students with ‘salaam’ and gets a loud ‘Jai Shri Ram’ in response.
Anum runs a school inside the temple in the Basti Guru area of the southern port city. The school is situated in the middle of an informal Hindu settlement which is facing constant threats from land grabbers.
But Anum is determined to impart knowledge about education, health and basic rights to the children of the minority community. In the settlement, 80 to 90 Hindu families live in a close cluster of wooden huts and some semi-constructed houses.
One can see Anum holding discussions with children of the settlement after her classes are over. “Everyone is surprised when I tell them about our school inside this temple but we had no other place to hold our classes when I first started coming here last year,” she told PTI.
The classes are conducted in the main area of the temple. The walls of the temple are plastered with posters of Hindu deities and statues of Hindu Gods placed up on a higher perch.
The lack of basic facilities is noticeable as one moves around the settlement located in Rehman Colony near Mahmoodabad but for land grabbers, it is not an ordinary piece of land. “There have been at least two incidents in the last four years when some huts were set on fire and the Hindu families were threatened and told to get out of the area,” Shiva Dharni, a community leader, said. Recently authorities also cut electricity and water connections to the Basti, which was set up in the 60s when the Hindu families migrated from Ghotki in interior Sindh to Karachi.
The area witnessed tensions a few years ago when a Muslim resident apparently started propagating an idea that a mosque should be constructed over the land. “These land grabbers try to persuade the Muslim clerics that having a settlement of lower caste Hindu in the center of a proper Muslim neighbourhood is unacceptable,” Arif Habib, who heads the non-governmental Initiator Human Development Foundation which has brought Anum to run the school in the temple, said.
“These are vulnerable communities and they are under threat from non-state actors, I mean land grabbers who want them to evacuate the plot where this settlement is located,” he said.
Anum reluctantly admits that some of the Muslim residents living around the settlement don’t like her involvement with the scheduled caste Hindu families and her holding classes.
“But I do it because these people are not even aware of their basic rights. Their children want to gain knowledge and education. Some of them attended other schools in the area but faced social and religious issues,” Anum said. (PTI)
Polluters to face 5-year jail term in Nepal
Kathmandu: The Nepal government has introduced a new law where anyone found guilty of polluting will be jailed for five years, an official from the Department of Environment said on Wednesday.
As per the new Criminal Code that came into force on August 17, anyone found guilty of producing mechanical noise, extreme heat and wastage without the consent of authorised government officials will be jailed for five years or fined 50,000 Nepali rupees ($450) or both. “The criminal code has provisioned that stringent action can be taken against those who are found involved in polluting the environment. Introducing the new law to control the pollution is indeed a positive aspect,” Safala Shrestha, a Department spokesperson, told Xinhua news agency. (IANS)