Hinduism in Pakistan

Followers of Hinduism in Pakistan comprise approximately 1.92% of the country's population. As of 2010, Pakistan had the fifth largest Hindu population in the world and the Pew Research Center predicts that by 2050 Pakistan will have the fourth largest Hindu population in the world.

Quotes

• Pakistan Hindu leader Raja Chander Singh... says that the Hindu migration to India is now (proportionally) bigger than during the Partition day: "The future of Hindus in Pakistan is very bleak... They are leaving because of fear".
  • Raja Chander Singh, The Week, 11/11/1990. Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (1991). Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society.

• To take a nice legalistic view about the matter that Hindus in Pakistan are Pakistani nationals would be dangerous and can only result in killings and reprisals in the two countries.
  • Joint statement for the Indo-Pak confederation that Deendayal Upadhyaya signed, on 12 April 1964, with Dr Lohia, quoted in L. K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008), p. 146

• No matter how much tyranny, how much injustice is heaped on Hindus anywhere in the world, the State of India is not bothered — this is the essence of Secularism in India.
  • A. Chatterjee: Hindu Nation (1995), quoted in Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind (New Delhi: Rupa, 2001), p. 518, commenting on the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh

• We are not allowed to pray peacefully in the temple or celebrate Hindu festivals.
  • Sukh Ram, a Hindu Pakistani refugee, as quoted in Koenraad Elst Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society (1991)

• Invisible walls were also rising among communities, between neighbors, and even within families. The seeds of intolerance had been there at the outset of Pakistan’s creation, though they’d been kept mostly buried. Now, Zia was watering them generously, and the Saudis were adding fertilizer. Mehtab had grown up with Hindu neighbors; they visited each other and played together. Soon, some Sunni Pakistanis refused to even have a Hindu cook in their house, because they considered the food impure.
  • Kim Ghattas Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020)