Author:
Publication: Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Date: May 24, 2001
Members of the Hindu community in
Afghanistan denied Thursday that the community had asked the ruling Islamic
Taliban to require them to wear a distinguishing mark on their clothing
to brand them as Hindus.
Jalalabad has the main concentration
of the small Hindu community of Indian origin in the country, not more
than 100 families in all.
"I came from Kabul last night. There
I met Hindu compatriots too. Nobody made any such (identity-mark) request
to the Taliban," Amar Das, head priest of the temple and political leader
of the Hindu community in Jalalabad, told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Das, 52, said when the radical Islamic
Taliban captured Jalalabad in 1996, their "Virtue and Vice" department
asked its non-Moslem men to wear caps and women to put on the veil, which
was accepted.
But its demand that the cap be red,
or they should have some other identity mark, was rejected.
"We will not accept the latest order
(about a yellow mark) also. If they force it upon us, we will try to leave
the country. But we prefer to live in Afghanistan because it is our homeland,"
he said.
Taliban officials had claimed that
the decision to make Hindus wear a yellow badge was taken at the community's
request because Hindus, who look like ordinary Afghan Moslems otherwise,
were feeling harassed by the religious police.
The police have the task of seeing
that Moslems in Afghanistan do not deviate from Islamic norms in public.
Men are required to wear beards and women the veil. Both sexes have to
offer Islamic prayers.
If they were forced to leave, the
Hindus would ask India to facilitate visa matters, Das said.
"A distinguishing mark would hurt
our dignity and also business. We are mostly businessmen. As marked men,
we will lose clients," he said.
But the Hindu community leader had
praise as well for the Taliban. "Life has been fine until now. Their government
has been the best one since 1979 (the year when the misfortunes of Afghanistan
began with the invasion by the former Soviet Union)," he said.
Das said he would not want India
to retaliate against the Taliban by similarly branding Indian Moslems.
"Not all. Indian Moslems are our brothers," he said, condemning the demolition
of the Babri Mosque in India by Hindu zealots in 1992.
Asked about a related order to non-Moslem
Afghans not to worship in public places, Das said this did not concern
Hindus as they worshipped in temples anyway and these were not open to
the public.
At the temple, a Pakistani Hindu
at prayer, Lal Jain, shrugged off a request for his comments on the Taliban
action, saying, "It is an internal matter of the Afghans."
Das's 60-year-old deputy, Ashiq
Kumar, said the Hindus had followed the Taliban-prescribed norms but were
unhappy with the indentity-mark order.
"We close our shops at (Islamic)
prayer times. Our women go out with their heads covered and men put on
caps. But they did not even consult us on the identity-mark order."
Kumar's worry was that his community
would get the blame "if a Moslem puts on the Hindu mark and commits some
crime, some mischief."
A Hindu shopkeeper, Sanjay Kumar,
22, said bluntly the Taliban had not asked Hindus' views. "They never consulted
us," he said.
There are Indian-origin Sikhs in
the country as well, but they make themselves distinguishable as non-Moslems
by wearing beards, turbans and metal bangles as mandated by their own religion.
The Taliban order applies to Afghan
nationals only and Hindu and Christian visitors are exempted from the identity
order.
Gorang Singh, a leader of Jalalabad's
Sikh community, had no objection to the distinguishing marks for the Hindus.
"It will be of benefit to the Hindus.
There is nothing degrading about it. With a yellow badge on them, they
will be spared by the Vice and Virtue police."
Before the communist takeover of
Afghanistan in 1978, there were an estimated 40,000 Hindus in the country.
But in the decades of war that followed in the name of Islam, their number
has been reduced to about 2,000.