Do Mahesh and Pooja Bhatt know they visited a disputed Hindu heritage site in Pakistan?
"The young ones! Talking to the kids about the magic & the mystery of acting at NAPA, Karachi," filmmaker and author Mahesh Bhatt, proudly tweeted from the commercial capital of Pakistan. NAPA stands for the National Academy of Performing Arts, which rose to prominence under former Pakistan Army general Pervez Musharraf, when the dictator ordered the handover of the Hindu Gymkhana to NAPA. Pakistan press reports said that Musharraf’s daughter Alia Raza was the driving force behind the transfer, but the dictator’s daughter denied the claims. Bhatt and his actress-daughter Pooja are in Karachi to attend an adaptation of his film Daddy, being staged at NAPA's international theatre festival.
"Enough said.. I now settle into my very comfortable seat on PIA & dream of all the delicious food I am going to eat in Karachi!," Pooja Bhatt tweeted from her business-class seat aboard the Pakistani national airliner, after putting up a picture of the PIA ticket in an earlier tweet. "The WORLD is my playground. Am born free & will die free. All the cretins suggesting I settle in Pakistan or even New York can take a hike!" Pooja Bhatt said in another tweet. It was obvious many Indians wanted the father-daughter duo to settle in Pakistan and not to return to India: there appear to be some solid reasons for Indian grievances against the celebrity family.
For one, millions of Indians will never forget that Mahesh Bhatt, along with Congress leader Digvijaya Singh, took part in the release of the book 26/11 : RSS ki Saazish or 26/11: An RSS Conspiracy. It is now clear the Mumbai terror attacks were sponsored by the infamous Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and orchestrated by Hafiz Saeed of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), but Bhatt never said sorry for his error of judgement. As if that was not enough, Bhatt's son Rahul befriended David Headley, the Pakistani American who is now serving a life term in a US prison for the Mumbai terror attacks. In the backdrop of the rumours, Rahul Bhatt wrote the book Headley and I to counter widespread allegations about his ties with Headley. The Pakistani American terrorist said in court that he had warned Rahul Bhatt not to go to south of Mumbai on November 26, 2008, when 166 Mumbaikars were gunned down and more than 250 wounded. "Headley told the Chicago court he had planned to recruit Bhatt as an ISI agent, and had even planned to take him to the tribal areas of Pakistan, but not to kidnap or kill him," according to the Hindustan Times.
Most importantly, one thing has been conveniently forgotten by the father-daughter duo during their tour of Karachi. The NAPA venue, where the Bhatts' movie Daddy was being staged, is actually the Hindu Gymkhana, now under litigation in the Sindh High Court and finds a mention in as many as 17 law suits. Hindus in Karachi and the rest of the southeastern Sindh province have been running from pillar to post, knocking high court and Supreme Court doors, to get the gymkhana back. The Hindu Gymkhana was built in Karachi in 1925 to serve as a club for the Hindu elite of Karachi at the zenith of Hindu cultural and business power in Sindh’s capital. The building was one of the finest in the city, built with donations from legendary Hindu businessman Seth Ramgopal Gourdhanandh Mohatta. Hindu rights defender Dr Jaipal Chhabria says the Hindu Gymkhana should be handed over to his community: "It is the property of Hindus. Dictator Pervez Musharraf took possession of it. The last PPP government did not take interest and this government of Nawaz Sharif is also silent."
According to Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune, Ramesh Kumar Vankwani - a patron of the Pakistan Hindu Council and a member of the national assembly - who belongs to premier Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML), had requested the Supreme Court to sanction the Hindu Gymkhana building exclusively to Pakistani Hindus.
In a concise statement, Vankwani told the Supreme Court that the Hindu community building was illegally declared as evacuee property and taken over by several institutions since Partition. He alleged that the state is bound by a number of articles of the 1973 Constitution to hand over the building to the Hindu community, but had become a silent spectator. "The Hindu community has been left without a place dedicated exclusively for their activities," Vankwani had petitioned, adding that the Hindus' vibrant culture is threatened by "extinction".
In a letter in Dawn, the scion of one of the oldest Hindu families of Karachi, VG Advani, wrote, "I have been and still am the president of the Hindu Gymkhana and hold its records and papers in trust in the hope that one day this edifice of 39,178 square yards would be returned to its rightful people. On LK Advani's last visit, I had appealed through your column that it would have been a great opportunity for us to welcome him at the Hindu Gymkhana which did not happen."
LK Advani, former deputy prime minister of India, visited his birthplace in Karachi in June 2005.
VG Advani wrote, "The Hindus have always been here and are still the largest minority community in Sindh and they keep growing. The National Academy of Performing Arts and the others should give back our heritage site."
The Ratneshwari Maha Dev Welfare Sewa Madly, a Hindu religious welfare organisation, took the matter to court in a bid to get back their heritage site. According to a February 28, 2008 report in Daily Times, their petition maintained that the Hindu Gymkhana was protected under the Sindh Cultural Heritage Preservation Act. The petitioner stated that the property was illegally taken by NAPA even though there were a number of other suitable places.
The petitioner said that out of the 38,626 square yards of the Hindu Gymkhana, 27,346 square yards were encroached upon by the police department, 6,700 square yards by the Federal Public Service Commission, 4,164 square yards by the Aligarh Muslim University Old Boys Association and 416 square yards by an individual named Abdul Majeed. Some parts of the heritage site were demolished, modified beyond recognition or damaged, in gross violation of the Heritage Act.
During the last Pakistan People's Party government, former president Asif Ali Zardari ordered the NAPA to move out of the Hindu Gymkhana so that it may be returned to the Hindu community, but the organisation led by its CEO, Urdu-speaking TV artiste Zia Mohyeddin, got a stay from the high court in defiance of the president’s order.
The loss of the Hindu Gymkhana and their ongoing legal fight to take it back is one of the major scars of the Partition in Karachi, which saw Sindhi Hindus flee after communal riots in early 1948.
Sindhi intellectual Haider Nizamani says mass migration of Sindhi Hindus to India "was a tragic loss scripted, orchestrated and implemented by non-Sindhis in Sindh." In an article in The Express Tribune, he recalls that Ayub Khuhro, the chief minister of Sindh after partition, had tried to prevent Sindhi Hindu and Sikh migration but prime minister Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan was angry with Khuhro and had said to him on January 9 or 10: "What sort of Muslim are you that you protect Hindus here when Muslims are being killed in India? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?" In April 1948, Pakistan's founding father Muhammad Ali Jinnah sacked the Khuhro government.
Orders of injustice to Hindus came from the very top. For example, Jinnah himself played an unfortunate role in taking over a fine property of a Karachi Hindu merchant. The exotic Mohatta Palace, the best palatial mansion in Karachi at the time, was owned by a Hindu trader, Shivratan Chandraratan Mohatta. The Mohatta Palace and the Hindu Gymkhana were designed by the same architect, who hailed from Agra, named Agha Ahmed Hussain. Solid stone from different Indian states was used in their building.
Pakistan's The News International reported Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) parliamentary leader and provincial minister Syed Sardar Ahmed as telling the Sindh assembly two years ago that the government "forcibly" occupied Mohatta Palace, prompting its owner Shivratan Chandraratan Mohatta to flee for India never to return. Mohatta had approached Jinnah to seek justice, without success, Pakistani media acknowledges. "After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the trader preferred to stay, but the government took over the palace stating that Quaid-e-Azam and his sister Fatima Jinnah wanted to live there, said Ahmed, a former chief secretary of Sindh. The Mohatta family's belongings were thrown out," The News International reported.
The Mohatta Palace was first used to house Pakistan's ministry of foreign affairs and later transferred to Jinnah's sisters.
In spite of the MQM leader's brutally honest revelations, Sindh officials privately say the mohajir party is blocking the return of the property to the Hindus of Karachi. However, Mohammed Anwer, right-hand man of MQM supremo Altaf Hussain denies the charge. "We are the only secular and liberal party. PPP is using our name actually they want to qabza karo (occupy the gymkhana)," Anwar said from London after his arrest and freedom in a money-laundering case.
According to international Sindh rights activist, London-based Lakhu Luhana, the occupation of Hindu Gymkhana can only be viewed in the backdrop of Hindu persecution and their general disenfranchisement in all spheres of life. "It is part of the ongoing ruthless persecution of indigenous Sindhi Hindus and disregard and disrespect of history of Sindhi people," said Luhana, the leader of the World Sindhi Congress.
The 1941 census records that, at the time, Hindus formed 51 per cent of the population of Karachi, which was then called the Paris of the East. The late father of this scribe used to own apartments in Old Karachi. Prior to the Partition, his tenants used to be Sindhi Hindus, who always used to pay the rent on time. But after partition, when he went to collect rent, the Muslim tenants who replaced the Hindus, cursed him instead of paying the rent.
They told him the "grass eaters" had left and they were beef eaters like him. "That day I realised what a monster Jinnah has created," my father said.