Refugee Watch-29-Who Went Where and How are They Doing

In the space of a few months during the Partition of India in 1947, twenty million people were displaced, a million died, seventy-five thousand women were said to have been abducted, raped, and families were, divided, properties lost, homes destroyed and countries (India and Pakistan) exchanged.[i] Excluding the internally displaced, today South Asia has the fourth largest concentration of refugees in the world.[ii] Going back to 1940s,[iii] Partition’s refugees/migrants during the last five decades have had a long’ and complex history in the course of reaching respective homelands, some of them more than once (in the 1940s-60s and then in 1970s onwards) and some of them found themselves disowned by it in 1971 when Bangladesh came into being. Those who could afford, turned diasporic, those who could not, await repatriation-to Pakistan and still others have decided on lives of constant border crossings.
By December 1951, 6,597,000 refugees had moved from ‘India to West Pakistan, and 7,94,127 refugees moved to what was then East Pakistan.[iv] Of the Indian Muslims headed for Pakistan during 1947­48, 95.9% of the migrants from Assam, West Bengal and Bihar moved to East Pakistan and 3.2% to Karachi;[v] According to the 1951 census, 66.69% of the migrants in East Pakistan came from West Bengal, 14.50% from Bihar, 11.84% from Assam and 6.97% from other places in India.[vi] A passport and visa scheme was introduced only on 15 October 1952. But travel documents were not even required until 1953­54, several years after India and Pakistan became two separate countries. Several government employees opted for Pakistan, although some changed their minds later and returned to India.[vii] Following riots in Khulna and Calcutta in January 1964 and as a reaction, in Jamshedpur and Rourkela in March 1964, there was a yet another spate of migrations in both directions a After the December 1971 India-Pakistan war Pakistan was no longer a migrant destination. Meanwhile the Middle East had emerged as an alternative.
When the autonomy movement picked up in the 1960s some ‘Bihiuis’ openly sided with the Pakistan regime. By December 1970, attacks on non-Bengali shops and properties by Bengali mobs were quite common in Dhaka and Chittagong. Many were killed at Chittagong, Jessore, Khulna, Rangpur, Saidpur and Mymensinghin early March 1971, even before the military action.[viii] Subsequently the Bangladesh government declared them to be Pakistanis who should be returned to their home country. Of the 534,792 Biharis who, applied for repatriation only 118,866 were accepted by the Pakistan government.[ix] Since the early 1970s, the, Bihari Muslim diaspora in the U.K. and U.S.A. intervened to salvage the Biharis from their existence in the 66 refugee camps across Bangladesh, initially through voluntary organizations, then the Asian Committee of the British Refugee Council and the Mecca based Rabita al Alam al Islam. In February 1972, Ghulam Sarvar, the editor of Sangam (Patna) floated the Bihari Bachao (Save the Biharis) Committee, which urged the Indian government to allow the uprooted Biharis to return to Bihar. While some of them did, others made Bihar a temporary base, en route to Pakistan, via Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand.[x]

It may be mentioned that earliest group of immigrants from South Asia to the U.S.A. were Punjabi men who settled mainly in California’s agricultural valleys in the 1910s and 1920s and constructed a “Hindu” ethnic identity, which in those days simply meant “from Hindustan or India”, even though 90% of the men were Sikhs and 8% were Muslims. They married Mexican and Mexican American women. After Partition, there was a rupture among California’s “Hindus”. In ethnic representations at county fairs, a “Pakistani Queen” joined the “Hindu Queen” and many Muslim-fathered families renamed themselves “Spanish Pakistanis”,[xi] On the east coast, in 1951, the New York based Pakistan League of America intervened against the deportation of “illegal” Pakistanis working as agricultural, factory, hotel and restaurant workers in New York, New Jersey, Michigan and California, and worked for a separate country quota for Pakistanis in the context of “millions” having been rendered homeless and refugees by Partition.[xii]
Across the Atlantic, in Southall, London, the fallout of Partition was found to be “as intense” as on the subcontinent and had tangible consequences in the public sphere. Thus Pakistani Southallians were only entitled to associate membership in the powerful Indian Workers’ Association. Muslims set up their separate community organizations, either: inclusively Muslim or specifically Pakistani or Bangladeshi.[xiii] An anthropological study of London’s Punjabi Hindus which did not solicit thoughts on the Partition found its memory underpinning the narratives of both migrants and their British born children.[xiv] Despite the increasing public privileging of an Islamic identity, diaspora Pakistanis continue to valorize their national roots.[xv]
The Stranded Pakistani General Repatriation Committee [SPGRC], formed in 1977, links the Bihari muhajirs in the 66 refugee camps and has had representatives in London, Chicago and Paris. Its overseas support network comes from the Bihar Muslim, rather than just the muhajir diaspora. The focus has been on working out the funding of their repatriation as a “humanitarian”, rather than a “political” project. The SPGRC has during its career authored several, simultaneous recasting of the muhajirs. As ‘refugees’ threatening to do a Vietnamese, by moving from coast to coast to get across their statelessness to an unmoved UN, which slots them instead as “displaced persons”. As ‘Muslim Refugees’ to get the support of the Mecca based Rabita al Alam al Islam. And trilingually, as Stranded/ Mehsoor/ Aatkay Pora Pakistanis to address their case more widely in English, Urdu and Bengali. While it shares the MQM’s perspective that it was migrants from undivided India’s Muslim minority provinces who created Pakistan there is a significant difference. It squarely blames the politics of the Muslim League for the uprooting of the Biharis and their being sacrificed three times over: in 1946, 1947 and 1971, and retrospectively idealizes Bihar, the pre-1947 homeland. In this 1980s reconstruction of the Pakistan movement, it is emphasized that the bulk of the railway employees opted for East Pakistan only in response to Jinnah’s call to get Pakistan going.[xvi]

According to Tariq Meer, an organizer of the MQM in Europe, following the army crackdown in Sindh in 1992, in the space of a couple of months “thousands” had gone underground to escape death and torture, “hundreds” claimed refugee status in Britain alone, and “hundreds” more had gone to the U.S. and Germany. “Much of our work (these days) is dealing with governments across the world checking with us about the claims for asylum and refuge… We are beginning to get inquiries also from countries like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Thailand and many others”. Many also escaped to Afghanistan to look for ways out from there.[xvii] About a year later the MQM protested to the British Home Office, the French and German Interior Ministries, that the refusal to consider the political asylum applications of the MQM cadres was in serious conflict with the UN conventions of 1951 that dealt with the rights of the refugees. The British Home Office, on its part, had turned down the applications because the MQM had become a coalition partner of the government in 1997. The MQM then argued that the army had launched its operation against its cadres in 1992, despite it? Being a coalition partner of the Nawaz Sharif government.[xviii] The U.S. and Canadian governments too have over the years been in touch with the MOM to check out political asylum applications.19 Meanwhile several MOM leaders on the run have been in hiding in the Gulf and the U.S. since 1992. Occasionally, whenever possible, their supporters arrange for them to meet the’ diasporic constituency. However, many hold back from coming out in the open as MOM supporters for fear of repercussions on their families back home. There are of course others, who either reject its politics or have come to distance themselves from its “terrorism”, after having initially supported it, or are plain indifferent to its career, domestic or diasporic. Significantly, in a couple of cases Pakistani community organizations have split along muhajir/ Punjabi lines in the 1990s.[xix]
The hardening of ethnic boundaries in Pakistan has over the years tightened the definition of muhajir, to produce “a revised category” which incorporates Urdu-speaking Pakistanis above all, to the exclusion of other ethnic groups who were similarly uprooted at independence”. Thus migrants from East Punjab gradually came to be labelled primarily as ‘Punjabi’ rather than muhajir, a description which was reserved more and more for refugees coming from northern India.[xx] Of the approximately one million muhajirs who settled in Sindh by 1951, 85 % were Urdu speakers from the pre-1947 provinces where Muslims were in the minority. Initially they were dominant in the Muslim League and the government. Not long after however, the party self-destructed and virtually vanished. With the late 1950s domination of the army in the Pakistani polity, the muhajirs came to be” edged out by the Punjabis. Around 1984 when the Muhajir Oaumi Mahaz was formed, it cut into the Jamat e Islami’s support among the migrants in Sindh. More recently the MQM has been described as “an excellent example of a movement that is diasporic, transnational and anti-state”, with a leadership in exile in London,[xxi] since the army operations began in 1992.
According to the MQM leader Altaf Hussain, guiding the movement from its international secretariat is expensive but adequately funded by supporters the world over.[xxii] His outreach inside and outside Pakistan is maintained with a combination of telephonic speeches and video addresses, with titles like Hum Door Nahi (I Am Not That Far Away). In 1996 the Overseas MQM had nineteen branches in the U.S.A. (started in 1988 and afresh in 1991) and two in Canada. In its estimate about 15% and 10% of the Pakistani diaspora in Chicago and New York are muhajirs, and some 10% of this strand is post-1992.[xxiii] The introductory comments of the 1994 Chicago annual banquet edition of MQM Vision, described diasporic muhajirs as its “natural constituency”, who could provide “decisive” support in restoring human rights in Pakistan.[xxiv]
Some support has been forthcoming. In 1995 the Coalition of Muslim Organizations of the greater Houston area, an umbrella group of 15 organizations in Texas wrote an open letter signed by 1,821 community members to all Pakistani leaders to resolve the Sindh situation with “an open mind” and passed a resolution against the massacre of citizens in Karachi. The Overseas MQM was on the panel of a seminar organized by the Pak-American Task Force for the Solidarity of Pakistan in 1995, in Detroif.[xxv] Likewise, in June 1995 the United Muslims of America (UMA), together with the Pakistan Association of the San Francisco Bay Area and the American Muslim Alliance, San Francisco organised a forum titled, ‘Why Is Karachi Bleeding?” Rifat Mahmood, the UMA chairman, emphasized that though muhajirs had built Pakistan for all Pakistanis, there were still so many of them stranded in Bangladesh. A resolution was passed to involve all political parties, “including the MQM”, in a conference to sort things out.[xxvi] A similar resolution was passed by the organizers of the forum on 19 August 1995, at the Pakistan Independence Day Festival at the Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Around December 1995, the UMA made an offer to send a team of “highly skilled and qualified arbitrators of eminent American Muslims to facilitate and enhance the peace negotiation” in Sindh. The following year too, at the 4th Pakistan Independence Day celebration at the Golden Gate, there was a pointed rewind to the 1940 Lahore resolution and a similar offer was repeated.[xxvii] On the east coast Dr Shafi Bezar, who headed the International Council for Repatriation of Pakistanis from Bangladesh in the 1980s in New York, floated the Mohajir International Forum in 1995. This has links with the community in New York, Chicago and California. The Forum’s solution lies in the creation of a muhajir subah in southern Sindh comprising Karachi and Hyderabad. Bezar claims that his cartographic intervention has received “tremendous support” in Karachi, and though there was “no direct answer from Altaf Hussain”, there was no opposition either.[xxviii]
The focus of the overseas MOM has been on making a human rights case of happenings in Sindh. In addition to its website updates, its twin videos, Extra judicial Execution and The Genocide include close-ups of reports of Amnesty International, Asia Watch~ World Organisation Against Torture and excerpts from U.S. State Department reports. Also scenes of tanks rolling on the streets of Karachi, morgue sequences, bereaved families and crowds at the funeral of Altaf Hussain’s brother and nephew. In 1996 the MOM published A Catalogue of the Victims (The Mohajir Nation) of State Crime, a 134 pages account detailing state action against MQM supporters, its leaders and rank and file during 1995. Death Warrant was an appeal to “the world conscience” against the persecution of a “22 million strong” nation. Similarly Genocide of the Mohajir Nation and Mohajir Rights Are Human Rights carry supportive copies of reports’ of international human rights organisations and western governments and stress that the MOM had been vindicated in national and provincial elections in urban Sindh in 1988, 1990 and 1993.[xxix] However, several of the human rights groups invoked by the MQM have also expressed their concern about its own human rights abuses, all of which is deflected as “concocted” preludes to legitimizing state repression. More recently the MQM organized protests in London, the U.S. (New York, Washington and Chicago), Canada, Germany, South Africa, Australia, Belgium and a couple of other countries to “internationalize” government atrocities against muhajirs, “16,000” of whom had been killed since 1992, in a terrain that it compares with Bosnia and Kosovo. Altaf Hussain added that he was only emulating the Pakistani government trying to internationalize the Kashmir issue through its action in Kargil.[xxx] The MQM tracks muhajirs as being crushed by the state right from the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan, but is more focused against the post-1992 operations.[xxxi]
A major demand made by the MOM in 1987 was that muhajirs be recognized as the fifth nationality (panchvi qaum), along with the Punjabis, Pathans, Balochs and Sindhis and that non-Sindhis and non­muhajirs should not be allowed to buy property in Sindh.[xxxii] Today its position is that if “national integration” is to be forged it is “imperative to recognize and accept the constitutional rights of Sindhi, Punjabi, Pakhtoon, Mohajir, Baloch, Saraiki, Brohi, Makrani and all other nationalities, fraternities, lingual, cultural and religious units”.[xxxiii] Not long ago however, around 1994, the MQM had moved close to creating a province comprising the southern Sindh cities of Hyderabad, Karachi, Mirpur and Thatta.[xxxiv] This “reduced notion of Pakistan”, i.e., Urdudesh/Muhajiristan/Jinnahpur has been attributed to second-generation muhajirs.[xxxv] A couple of months ago the MOM had warned of ‘another Bangladesh’ in case the Nawaz Sharif government extended job quotas on a rural-urban basis to pit the Sind his against the muhajirs.[xxxvi] Simultaneously however, Altaf Hussain stated that if Sindh continued to be “ruled from Punjab” then there would be no choice left but to demand the right to self determination, as written into the 1940 Lahore resolution. But he added that the basic disagreement between the MQM and the Jeay Sindh Oaumi Mahaz (part of the World Sindhi Conference formation to be discussed below) is that “they demand a separate ‘Sindho Desh’, whereas the MQM aims for full provincial autonomy for Sindh within the (geographical) framework of Pakistan”[xxxvii] A point often made by the MOM leader, Altaf Hussain, not too long ago was that when the muhajirs had a country they sought freedom; now that they have freedom they are seeking a country. [“Watan thaa to azadi dhoondta thaa; Ab azad hoon to watan dhoondta hoon’].[xxxviii]
The WSC’s stand regarding the repatriation of Biharis from Bangladesh has been that of opposing it stiffly. Thus in the late 1980s it sent a backgrounder on the Biharis to Lord Ennals of International Alert and the Asian Refugee Council to put its point of view across. In its recall the Biharis had migrated to East Pakistan “of their own free will in search of a better life”. But “instead of merging with the native population they tried to impose their language and culture” on the Bengalis and later established “terrorist organizations called Al Shams and Al Badr which were active in the massacre of Bengalis in 1971 and then went on to become “unwanted parasites”. It was ironic, according to its then chairman, Halepota, that the MQM had emerged along similar lines and with the intention of turning Sindhis into a minority, to make them “aliens in their own homeland”.[xxxix] This continues to be the WSC position and its meeting in London on 29th August 1999 passed a resolution both against the repatriation of Biharis to Sindh and for the return of “illegal migrants” to their countries of origin.[xl]
But very recently and perhaps significantly,- the chairman of the WSC, Dr Safdar Sarki noted, that it was a positive sign that Altaf Hussain had for the first time “explicitly and resolutely expressed his views on the injustice and wickedness inflicted upon Sindh and Sindhis after the creation of Pakistan” by Punjabis [see above]. In response, he added that the Sindhis had never trampled the rights of the Urdu-speaking population, nor had they shut their doors to “the new settlers” in 1947. He also recalled that G.M.Syed had seen in the MOM the debut of lower and middle class leadership among the Urdu-speaking people, but regretted that subsequently the MQM was turned against the Sindhis by “Punjabi agents”. That, he regarded as the “biggest mistake of the MOM in its history”. Was it not time, that the Urdu-speakers called themselves Sind his, fifty years after migration and when all of them were born in Sindh?
Have we not seen a similar trend all over the world? Especially in the UK and USA, many immigrants have accepted local identities in one way or other, and many people proudly call themselves “British” or “American”. The same holds true for immigrants from Africa, China, and Latin America, who made UK or USA their home. They keep their languages and cultures intact and practice their customs. Yet, they are part of the host na1ions. Why don’t we accommodate a comparable scheme in the case of Sindh?[xli] Thus, for Sarki the possibility of retrieving the legacies of Shah Latif afld G.M.Syed towards resolving Partition’s migrant history is to be sought in the pedagogy of diasporic formations.[xlii]

Compared to overseas communities of other origins, the total number of people of South Asian descent who’ are living outside South Asia is quite small. Exact figures are difficult to come by because of major national differences in census taking. But a decade ago the total number of South Asians living outside Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka was about 8.6 million, i.e. fewer than 1% of the combined populations of these South Asian countries.[xliii] Very briefly, the first wave of migration from the subcontinent started around 1830 and lasted until 1920 and consisted of indentured labour recruited for the plantations and railways that were being established in the British and French colonies. The second wave of emigration from the subcontinent occurred between 1920 and 1939 when small groups of traders and white-collar migrants travelled to British East Africa, South Africa and Malaya. The third period of emigration began after the Second World War and includes the following strands. Workers are in the lowest levels in factories foundries and textile mills in the expanding British economy. Across the Atlantic, South Asian immigration to both the U.S.A. and Canada has been two-phased. One dating from the early twentieth century and more staggered and discontinuous, comprising in the main of the labouring and agricultural class and the second, around the mid­1960s, of mainly middle class professionals.[xliv] Following shifts in the world economy around the mid-1980s, migrants from smaller towns and less privileged backgrounds are now working at restaurants, news­stands and grocery stores or driving taxicabs.[xlv] In addition since the oil price rise in 1973 there has been a wave of migrants to the Middle East,[xlvi] totaling between three and four million South Asian workers. On the whole, South Asians comprise 0.5% of the U.S. population and about 2% of the Canadian population.[xlvii]
According to one estimate South Asian Muslims in the U.S. add up to between 250,000 and 450,000, with about 160,000 Indians, 80,000 Pakistanis and 10,000 Bangladeshis. Quite the reverse of the U.S., where Muslims from the Middle East are in a majority, it is South Asians who predominate in Canada, as they do in Britain. Early South Asian Muslim immigrants were mostly farm labourers from Punjab and moved to the U.S. from western Canada, settling in California, Oregon and Washington. In the 1920s and the 1930s, sailors, small traders and factory workers from Bengal in particular Sylhet, settled in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, with a few moving to industrial centres like Boston and Detroit. Several students who enrolled in American universities in the 1950s and 1960s just stayed on. The largest and most “homogeneous group of Indian Muslims belong to Hyderabad. Numerically, Gujratis and Mahrashtrians come next followed by Muslims from Assam, Bengal and Bihar Though widely dispersed in the U.S., there are large concentrations in California, Illinois, and New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and more recently in Texas, Florida and Georgia.

Within this formation the emergence of the American Federation of Muslims From India [AFMI] in 1989 was equally a statement on the tokenism faced in the Indian community at large and the non-Indian preoccupations of the umma, despite the fact that Indians add up to 12.5 – 13% of the community. Based in Detroit, it has regional presidents in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Texas, Washington DC and Canada and an international liaison committee covering USA, Germany, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UK. Its intervention against the Hindutva project is summed up in its statement submitted to the Indian prime minister, Narasimha Rao in 1993 in which it summed up that India stood torn between “those who want to turn the 46 years old republic into a, Hindu state…and those who are keen to establish secularism”. During the 1993 elections, it identified UP as the battleground between fascist and secular forces. In its perception what had sharpened the struggle was the fact that the citizenship of Indian Muslims was “still under suspicion” years after Partition. Together with other Indian American Muslim organisations it campaigned during 1994 for the release of Muslims held without trial after the 1992-3 riots under TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive and Activities Act). In 1994 it forged an alliance with the International Dalit Sena, led by Ram Vilas Paswan of the Janata Dal: It has simultaneously been taking on the Hindutva ensemble in the U.S. through its newsletters and advertisements in Indian American newspapers “to counter the myths and lies propagated by Hindu extremists”. Alerted by some Indian leftists it ran a successful campaign against the phone company, AT&T in 1994, for being party to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) fund-raising, by pointing out that this would “only lead to the unleashing of more terror and death on minorities in India.”
Between 1994 and 1996 AFMI has organized educational meets in Delhi, Lucknow and Patna to achieve its target of 100% literacy for Indian Muslims by the year 2005. It has also urged the US government to allocate “say 10-15%” of US investment specifically for minority entrepreneurs. However, its response to economic liberalization has been uncritical in its expectation that it will generate immense “opportunities” for Muslims. And though its electoral watch was centred on north India it did not engage with the shifts that have occurred within the community both at the levels of leadership and agenda, in particular the movements for affirmative action among the subaltern Muslim biradaris since the 1990s. These movements have not only challenged the ashraf leadership for having led the Pakistan movement and subsequently focused on “emotive” issues mobilizing around communitarian-identitarian symbols, but emphasized the lower caste pre-conversion roots of 90% of the community. At least in Bihar, the dalit and backward Muslims have intervened to inscribe their agency l5y keeping track of AFMI’s projects. Thus the All India Backward Muslim Morcha pointedly gave its literature to its delegation visiting India. And the Amarat e Ahle Ansar associated with the Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz passed a resolution against AFMI for seeking reservation for “all” Muslims.
Other organizations that have focused on contesting Hindutva and funding relief and legal aid to Muslims arrested in the aftermath of riots of 1992-3 (“about 80%” of the “65,000 TADA detenus” were Muslims) and in general campaigned for the human rights of Indian Muslims include the Indian Muslim Relief Committee of the Islamic Society of North America (IMRC), the Consultative Committee of Indian Muslims in the U.S. and Canada (CCIM), and the Association of Indian Muslims of America (AIM). According to AIM, which represents over “100,000” Indian Muslims in North America, though 60 million Muslims had rejected the two-nation theory and stayed on in India in 1947, they have been victims’ of the backlash of the formation of Pakistan during the past several decades. Thus Indian Muslims are stereotyped as being fundamentalist and “intolerant of the Hindu majority” bath in the Indian and North American press. Ever since the making of Pakistan, notwithstanding their having cleared that “agnipariksha”, they have been on the receiving end of “unrelenting economic discrimination, injustices, humiliation, intimidation, carnage of violent riots and considerable loss of life and property”. AIM intends to forge links with progressive Indians and has been working an establishing links with Pakistani Americans. It supports the search far a “new leadership” among progressive Indian Muslims who. “Should definitely not wage campaigns an symbolic issues like the Shah Bana affair arthe Satanic Verses issue”. More importantly it holds that the “state of siege” in the Muslim community needs to be broken. In January 1995 same AIM office bearers on a visit to England held meetings with the Indian Muslim Federation (IMF), the largest organization of Indian Muslims in the UK, and the Union of Muslim Organizations of UK to work on joint campaigns and projects aimed at improving the situation of Muslims in India. However, two years ago, the IMF (which had earlier organized protests against the Bhagalpur riot in 1989) appeared divided aver its approach to the Bharatiya Janata Party, though it was still dominated by pea pie who supported the Janata Dal ar the Cangress.[xlviii]
The Canadian Council of South Asian Christians, established in 1991, includes Christians from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and has been working on overcoming their exclusion and discriminatory treatment bath within the South Asian and wider Canadian community. It aims at dialogue with non-Christian South Asian organizations “to create a better understanding between the communities”. A representative mention may be made of one of its community service awards in 1996. The recipient was Shadab Khakhar of the International Christian Awaz, far his five-year long campaign against religious persecution in Pakistan under the blasphemy law. Through his initiative protest rallies were launched in Toronto and Ottawa in 1991 and 1993. A memorandum of understanding was signed between the Canadian government and Awaz, as result of which 200 families migrated to Canada by the end of 1996. Last year the National Association of the Asian Indian Christians protested to the UN to increase international pressure and the BJP-led government to rein in right-wing Hindu groups who had made several attacks an the community in India.[xlix]The Bangladesh Hindu, Buddhist and Christian Unity Council, UK, it may be mentioned here is in touch with the World Sindhi Congress which has taken a stand against the rise of religious fundamentalism and called far the immediate abolition of the blasphemy law in Pakistan. [l]
The elite Indian American organizations include the Association of Indians in America, the Federation of Indian Associations [which split into. the FIA, the Federation of Hindu Associations and the FIA-Indian Origin between 1994-7] and the National Federation of Indian American Associations. They are known to have made efforts to win greater US government support far India (and less favour to Pakistan), an effort that has occasionally made the Indian community support right wing politicians. In general, the leadership of the Indian immigrant community is conservative. It has not sought to farm alliances with other ethnic groups. In the late 1980s, far instance, Chinese and Koreans in the New York area made tentative moves towards a pan-Asian combination against racial discrimination but there was no response from the Indians. In fact mast Indian immigrants express open prejudice against African Americans and Hispanics and non-white migrants. By contrast, many South Asian immigrants in bath Canada and Britain have chosen an alternative strategy, identifying themselves as ‘black’.[li] It has been argued the Indian immigrant bourgeoisie -remembers the history of the Indian community in the U.S. largely in terms of its awn history since the mid-twentieth century. This selective memory that deletes the pre- First World War subaltern immigrants (the farmers, railroad builders, workers and political refugees) from its narrative, is seen to flaw from its model minority self-image, one that seriously limits its understanding of racism and its response to other communities, By contrast, the history of the pre-first world war immigrants is summed up as mare’ radical in its awareness of the scope of western imperialism and the diaspora generated by it. While this perspective does not mean to devalue the importance of a minority group’s efforts at creating a voice of itself, it paints to its intense racism towards other communities and its denial of the existence of marginalized Indians: the illegal migrants, the ill-paid labaurers and domestic workers, gays, lesbians and battered women. Thus community events became the space in which the bourgeois immigrant centrals the fate of national culture and appropriates Indian immigrant identity.[lii]

During the past two decades the Hindu right has been doing intensive propaganda among the Indian immigrants in the US, UK and Canada. It is against this backdrop that we documented the intervention of same Indian American Muslims and will, later in this section consider that of some, leftist groups. But first is a look at the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHP­A). It is registered in thirteen states, mostly on the East Coast and has a membership of around 2000. At the local level it has “contacts” with about 10,000 families.
Much of its work focuses on children’s educational programmes and youth camps. It publishes literature on the “Hindu way of life” and runs its social service projects mostly in India. But its influence extends welt beyond its enrolment. According to one summing up, in the US religious identity becomes a way of evading racial marginality. Moreover, support for a strong nationalist state at home is seen to promise a better status in the terrain migrated to. Unsurprisingly contemporary Hindu nationalism articulates “a genteel multi-culturalist presence in the US with militant supremacism in India”.[liii]
At the “First Dharma Sansad in the Western Hemisphere” organized by the YHP-A in Pennsylvania in August 1998 the achievements catalogued included the setting up of the Hindu University of America in Orlando and the expansion of the Hindu Students Council (HSC) to “almost fifty campuses”. It was added that, “it is because of the brilliant work of some of the very bright people of the HSC, (that) the Hindu Dharma has a major presence on the Internet and the World Wide Web”. The report of the Sansad detailed the antecedents of the contemporary “Hindu Diaspora” to include the Buddhist dispersal at “the time of Emperor Ashoka” and subsequently that of the Vaishnavs in South East Asia. “Then came the darker time of foreign invasions…then came another. Diaspora was in the nineteenth century the forced one, when the British took Hindus [completely overlooking the 15% of the jahazis who were Muslims] to their colonies”. It sees the “most recent”, i.e. the second half of the twentieth century one as likely to bring about “more far reaching effects than any other Diaspora”. The resolutions passed were unmistakably homogenizing in intent. “The VHP-A should be the voice of Hindus in the western hemisphere. All religious, spiritual, cultural organizations, temples and ashrams should associate, endorse and /or affiliate with the VHP-A, to make the Hindu Voice more effective” (original emphasis). It also resolved to publish “an authentic history book of India and its heritage for the benefit of the young generation of Hindus in the Western Hemisphere”. At the same meeting Ashok Singhal regretted that the divisions of sect, caste and language were “unfortunately retained even in the foreign lands” (sic). He stressed that “Unifying Hindus is not sufficient, We must be assertive Hindus. We have always been compromising… [liv]
“Youth Ready to Induct Time Tested Hindu. Values in Modern Society”, reads the title of a report on a youth conference in Boston in June 1998. The Hindu Heritage Day in Houston that May spent “some serious moments at the mention of the more then 40 Kashmiri Hindus” killed around that time, “just for being Hindus”. The same issue of Hindu Vishwa carries an e-mail reminding readers that “there may be so many Hindus from Afghanistan, in the US & Europe who are waiting for some help from us” and that the Taliban had imposed jizya on Hindus. It also carried a notice that the Global Hindu Electronic Networks (GHEN) was adding eleven new Amar Chitra Kathas to Freeindia.org, an educational website which is a project of the HSC. The new additions included Shivaji, Valmiki, Vidyasagar, Mirabai, Parshuram, Prithviraj Chauhan, Harishchandra, Ganesha, Kumbakarana, Draupadi and Rana Pratap.[lv] Significantly over the last few years in universities and community centres in Britain, the VHP has been targeting Hindu Asian youth with the slogan, “Better to be a Hindu Asian than a British Asian” and projecting Hindutva as the answer to the Muslim fundamentalism sweeping the college campuses.[lvi]

The Lease Drivers Coalition (LDC), a community-based organisation of the Committee Against Asian Violence (CAAAV, 1986), which grew out of feminist and leftist Asian American politics, was formed in 1992 and organizes South Asians who form 50% of the New York’s 30,000 yellow cab drivers.[lxiii] Subsequently called the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), the focus is on negotiating the racialized police force, the exploitative garage owners, the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) inspectors and courts. Most drivers work about 84 hours a week in 12-hour shifts. In 1997 some drivers invested in citizens band radio networks to bond themselves linguistically (about 31/40 are Punjabi networks and around 5 Bengali). The organizing committee members meet two or three times each month, and general members meet once in every two months. Initially the bulk of the roughly 700 members were Pakistanis. On 13 May 1998 the NYTWA co-organized a taxi strike in New York, during which 97% of the drivers are believed to have been off the streets against 17 new anti- worker laws proposed by the TLC. The LDC profiled itself as being different from other unions and driver organizations in that it had “equal respect for Bangladeshi, Indians and Pakistanis”. This solidarity making is conceptualized as a prelude to linking up with drivers of “all other communities”, such as African Americans, Latinos, Europeans and non-coloured Americans.
The Canadian counterpart of the South Asian movement is said to have “a somewhat older history” than the American one. Thus for example, the proliferation of South Asian materials emanating from Canada (films, music, cultural events, journals, anthologies) has yet to be matched in the US. This has been attributed to two factors. The significantly larger concentrations of South Asian populations are in large Canadian metropolitan centers such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. And the unconscious promotion of ethnic identities through Canada’s declared “mosaic” policy in multicultural affairs.[lxiv] In Toronto, the post-1960s South Asian diaspora has recently expanded with the arrival of 100,000 Tamils, many of them asylum seekers. Here progressive activists, some of whom belong to the South Asian Committee of the New Democratic Party have been forging a collective. This includes the Progressive Pakistani Committee, the North American Sikh League, the Tamil Eelam Society, the Canadian Council of South Asian of South Asian Christians (mentioned earlier) and the Scarborough Muslim Association .The agenda is to think through participation in Canadian politics as well as to intervene against racism both among South Asians and other metropolitan communities.[lxv]
The South Asia Solidarity Group (SASG) supports people’s struggles against exploitation and oppression in South Asia and strengthening the links between these struggles and those of Asian communities in Britain. In Britain its activities have included supporting Asian women workers demanding basic rights, organizing against racist attacks and opposing racism in health and education policies, as well as fighting repressive immigration and asylum laws. It also produces and distributes written material. One of the events in its -campaign of saying no war and fascism in India and Pakistan included distribution of leaflets on mass scale and collecting signatures at the World Cup final at Lord’s cricket ground two years ago. Its quarterly, Inquilab, carries articles takes on debates among the left in South Asia and Britain. Its conference on “Globalization, Identity and Resistance” in October 1997, to mark 50 years of the end of British rule in South Asia drew nearly 200 participants, both activists and academics from South Asia, Britain and Canada. The workshops examined themes such as workers’ struggles and globalization; cultural production and globalization; gender and nationalism; nationalism and refugees; communal/fascist parties rooted in the denominational politics of Partition; and national liberation struggles in Kashmir, Baluchistan, Sri Lanka and of the Jumma people in Bangladesh. “In’ a period when erstwhile progressive writers and intellectuals are becoming apologists for imperialism”, the organizers highlighted the significance of bringing together a coherent critique of globalization. As a follow-up the SASG is “beginning to examine the growth of communalism in the Asian community in Britain It is also working on developing a coherent left perspective on workers’ struggles in Britain. As it see it, “this will involve working with a wide network of groups and identifying possibilities for unity”.[lxvi]
A random look at the letters to the editor columns of newspapers in the Gulf and a couple of interviews indicate that ethnic and communal politics flowing from the Partition experience and the nation states defined by it, avidly engage the South Asian community and explain fund-raising initiatives and political affilitations.[lxvii] What became sharply evident, since the early 1990s in particular, at several levels and in different ways, both in the subcontinent and the South Asian diaspora is that the denominational nation making projects of the 1920s -1940s are still around…and are being worked on/ bypassed/questioned/ transcended. It is a contested field, but given the combination of transnational practices and transborder technologies, as also the different, gendered layers of the Partition diaspora itself, it is imperative for social scientists and activists to track events, trends and debates in the subcontinent as well as in the diaspora.[lxviii]
Thus for example, the South Asia Citizen’s Web has emerged as an “independent space on the net to promote dialogue and information exchange between and about South Asian citizens’ initiatives [located in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and in their diasporic communities]” (emphasis added).[lxix]…Likewise, the web site of the Bombay based journal Communalism Combat notes that its subscribers include anti-communal Indian groups in the US, Canada and UK.[lxx] Similarly, more and more non­governmental organizations in South Asia are beginning to forge regional networks to tackle issues like mass movements of refugees and cross-border migration. In 1994 the South Asian Human Rights community acquired a profile to work on discrimination against minorities, women’s rights, torture and extra judicial killings.[lxxi] It should be added that one of the resolutions of the six year old Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum For Peace and Democracy at its 1995 session in New Delhi decided that “future such people to people meetings should include Indian and Pakistani diaspora.”
The Pakistan-India People’s Forum is an attempt at making the constituency for a sub continental peace movement visible. It is ranged against state sponsored ideologies of demonizing the other that inform the “national security” agendas of the post Partition nation states. Its five joint conferences in Delhi, Lahore, Calcutta, Peshawar and Bangalore in 1995-2000 attended by representatives of trade unions and mass organizations, academics, artists and activists got support from members of the Pakistan-Indian Diaspora. Regarding Kashmir, it aims at getting past the assumption that post-colonial nation-state boundaries are sacred and that it is just a territorial I dispute. This is seen as basic to reducing communal and ethnic tension in the subcontinent and scaling down defence expenditure and militarism Its re-definition of political nationhood contests the minimizing of contact between the people by governments that impose restrictions on travel between the two countries and on the duration of each stay. The Forum is therefore working for the granting of visas with greater ease, the reduction of costs of telecommunications and postal exchange and facilitating the free exchange of journals and information. It also proposes the joint preparation of resource books and pamphlets and literature alternate people-to-people television channels and joint cultural productions and securing the rights of cross­ border migrant labour. Given the connections that are made between the “border question” and the “communal question” this is going to be uphill going. Significant headway has however been made in linking up the women’s movements in Pakistan and India. This will expand to include drawing up a charter of women’s rights, The expectation is that Muslim women in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka supporting this charter will support Muslim women in India and women in Pakistan will get support in their demands for women’s rights beyond the present focus on marriage, divorce and personal laws.