Adityanath’s Sindhi outreach: Tracing the roots of it

500 वर्षों के बाद ‘श्री राम जन्मभूमि’ वापस ली जा सकती है तो कोई कारण नहीं कि ‘सिंधु’ को वापस न ले सकें… pic.twitter.com/prXz2o75PJ

— Yogi Adityanath (@myogiadityanath) October 8, 2023

History of Sindh

The Sindh province borders Rajasthan on the West and Gujarat on the North; Karachi is its most famous city.

Professor Rita Kothari, the Head of the Department of English at Ashoka University, who has worked extensively on the region’s history, wrote in her 2004 Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) paper “Hardening of Identities after Partition”, that the British captured Sindh in 1843, taking over from the Talpur Mir dynasty, and bringing to an end Islamic rule in the area going back to 712 AD. The province was estimated to have a 75% Muslim population.

Under the British, Sindh came to be under the Bombay Presidency. Kothari writes that the neglect of Sindh under the Bombay Presidency led to the demand for an autonomous province. And that while this demand was “a local, administrative issue at the beginning of the 20th century”, it would harden – and assume a religious colour — with the growth of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League.

“Sindh seemed like a foundation on which to build the edifice of a Muslim nation, while the Hindu Sindhis feared that they would be reduced to a religious minority in a separate state,” writes Kothari.

On April 1, 1937, Sindh gained autonomy from the Bombay Presidency (by the Government of India Act of 1935), by which time historians say, there was an unbreachable rift between its Muslims and Hindus.

It was in Sindh that the call for Partition was first raised formally in 1938. A resolution supporting the demand was made here in 1942.

Many Sindhi Hindus fled to India after Karachi saw riots on January 6, 1948, mostly by sea, arriving in Mumbai, Porbandar, Veraval and Okha in Gujarat. Over two million came to India. But unlike Punjab and Bengal, Sindh did not see major episodes of violence during the Partition.

The 2011 Census put the number of Sindhi speakers in India at 27.72 lakh, or 0.23% of the population. Most of them were based in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Delhi-NCR and Uttar Pradesh.

The Sangh and Sindh

In another paper for EPW, titled ‘RSS in Sindh (1942-48)’, Kothari highlighted through her interviews with the Sindhi community that a generation that saw “the communalised politics” in the region leading up to Partition came to India with that legacy. Many of them were RSS sympathisers.

“In India, they have un/consciously transmitted their experiences and ideology to the next generation. From among those succeeding generations have emerged some of the most hardened followers of Hindutva,” she wrote.

Several Sindhi Hindu leaders rose to senior positions in the BJP, including former Gujarat minister Maya Kodnani, who was charged but later acquitted in cases relating to the 2002 riots in the state, former BJP president and deputy prime minister L K Advani, and BJP co-founder K R Malkani. Advani, who was born in Sindh in undivided India, has talked about his “sorrow” at the region not being part of India.

“Of the many factors that might be responsible for the Sindhis’ preference for a right-wing Hindu political party like the BJP, one is the RSS,” Kothari wrote.

However, another possible reason for the community’s closeness to the BJP has been its fraught relationship with the Congress. Kothari wrote that Congress representatives in Sindh such as Choithram Gidwani and Tarachand Gajra felt that senior party leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel were “indifferent to their province”.

Wrote Kothari, “For the Congress headquarters in Delhi, Sindh seemed too far, its problems small and peculiar. In his correspondence with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, journalist M S M Sharma reports that Congress leaders in Sindh seemed ‘more Hindu Sabhaites than Congressman’, and hastens to add that ‘that could not be helped’. Patel responded to this with incomprehension, a common response towards Sindh, ‘Sindh is a peculiar province. I am not sure I understand it. No principles seem to work there. It is a strange place’.

Nehru echoed a similar sentiment, but with more negativism in a letter to Padmaja Naidu, a freedom fighter and the daughter of Sarojini Naidu, “I do not feel attracted to Sindh. I have nothing to say about it.”

Current status

In Pakistan, the Sindhi Hindus have claimed persecution at the hands of their Muslim counterparts.

In India, their importance grows come elections. In the coming Madhya Pradesh polls, both the BJP and Congress have been trying to woo the community. While Congress chief minister face Kamal Nath has accused the BJP of “insulting” Advani, who has been sidelined since the Modi government came to power, Congress-turned-BJP leader Jyotiraditya Scindia has called Advani “the finest leader of the party”.

In the run-up to the polls, Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced several sops for the Sindhi community in the state, including financial assistance of Rs 25,000 for pilgrimage to a holy site of the community in Ladakh, land pattas for Sindhi refugees at a nominal price, and the promise of a statue of teen revolutionary Hemu Kalani in Bhopal, Indore and Jabalpur.