I lost an entire post earlier, but perhaps itās for the best. Iāve had the time now to clarify my thoughts and this is better to make clear the new policy of just junking comments that don’t “smell right.”
What prompted me to write again was a small but telling excerpt from a recent Dawn article. It wasnāt just that they misspelled āBrahmanā; they wrote āBarhaman,ā a word that doesnāt exist in any linguistic tradition. It was also the order in which they listed religions. They wrote:
āā¦revered for not only the followers of the worldās three major religions ā Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduismā¦ā
Hinduism, the oldest and most foundational of the three, was placed last. This is not trivial. Both Buddhism and Sikhism evolved from Hinduism. Yet in Pakistani discourse, so marked by dislocation and disavowal, Hinduism is routinely treated as a junior or fringe faith. This is what endemic Hinduphobia looks like: not explicit violence, but civilizational misordering, semantic erasure, and the subtle, continuous downgrading of Hindu memory.
Itās barely recognized. And thatās the point. Continue reading The Long Defeat: How Hinduphobia Hollowed Out Pakistan