one thing i have noticed that hindus are usually darker then muslims or sikhs, is it this because hindus are Indian?? and many muslims and sikhs have recent outside genes?

Excerpts from a write up by Tarek Fateh a pakistan born canadian columnist

http://iaoj.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/racism-in-pakistan/ - R http://iaoj.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/racism-in-pakistan/ - acism in Pakistan

16102010

http://wp.me/p7eUy-1W5"> By: Tarek Fatah

“Zardari, after all is a Sindhi, from a people most upper class Punjabis think off as backward, lazy, illiterate serfs who are unpatriotic and thus not deserving to be at the helm of affairs. This Punjabi elite cannot get over the fact, the man they hated, from a people they despised, has ended up as the president of the country, and that too without their blessing.”

Pakistan is a multi-national and multi-lingual country of diverse peoples that wraps itself in the banner of Islam. However, its elites practice neither Islam nor recognize diversity.

On the contrary, the dominant ruling elites, the Punjabi upper middle class, civil and military officers, as well as the landed aristocracy have ruled the nation for over 60 years with a sense of entitlement that bristles with racism and chauvinism.

One would have thought the Punjabi ruling classes would have learnt a lesson in 1971 after their colonialist policies in then East Pakistan destroyed the country. However, instead of facing the truth, it seems this sense of entitlement and colonial attitude has been reinforced and passed on to the next generation.

These men and women simply see themselves as the normative and all other Pakistanis, be they religious or racial minorities, as their subjects.

Only if one recognizes this internal racism of the Pakistan’s ruling Punjabi elites, including the media, can one can get to understand the near hysterical nature of the opposition to President Asif Ali Zardari that takes on a vicious personal nature.

At times it seems the hatred targeted at Zardari is sheer jealousy. More than one such gentleman has said Zardari did not deserve to have been the husband of Benazir Bhutto; a position they feel should have been reserved for them or one of their fellow Punjabis who fake colonial British accents, false Muslim bravado, but back their patriotism with genuine Canadian passports.

Zardari, after all is a Sindhi, a people most upper class Punjabis think off as backward, lazy, illiterate serfs who are unpatriotic and thus not deserving to be at the helm of affairs. This Punjabi elite cannot get over the fact, the man they hated from a people they despised, has ended up as the president of the country, and that too without their blessing”

This arrogant and racist attitude is not reserved just for the Sindhis, but also includes the Baloch, a people treated like the Blacks in America before the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Blogger Wasiq Ali captured this feeling best. On August 7, 2009, he wrote about a recent report by Transparency International that inside Pakistan the ‘perception’ is that while corruption is down in Punjab, it has increased in places like Sind or Baluchistan.

Wasiq writes:

“Quite clearly the perception creators are Punjabi chauvinists who deem the “lowly” Sindhis and Baloch more corrupt than themselves. Ironically, there is more wealth –and vulgar display of wealth in Punjab—than in Sind and Baluchistan. We must all believe, as true believers in the ideology of Pakistan, that the Porsches and BMWs of the Chaudhries of Gujarat and the Sharifs of Raiwind are all legally obtained but the Pajeros of the Baloch and Pashtun Sardars are not. And, of course, the Sindhi Asif Zardari was “horrible’ for owning horses and feeding them apples (which, by the way, all horses are fed) but the Punjabi Sharifs are non-corrupt even when they own rare Siberian Tigers [Imported from Canada].”

In a country where ordinary Punjabi military generals retire as multi-millionaires in US dollars, it is fascinating that the tarred word ‘corruption’ is associated, not with them, but is reserved exclusively for politicians from the Sind and Baluchistan.

Thus, President Asif Ali Zardari has to live with the title “Mr. Ten Per Cent,” not because he has been convicted of the charge of corruption despite being interned for over ten years, but because the phrase has a sexy rhyme to it. It is repeated ad nauseam by the media who cannot comprehend anyone outside the Punjabi framework as being independently wealthy.

Now those same elites are using Transparency International’s report on ‘perceptions’ to denigrate a democratically elected government in Pakistan that is dedicated to eliminate the jihadi threat to the country.

According to Wasiq Ali, “The words of ‘transparency’ and ‘international’ are good attraction points to draw public attention in Pakistan because of vague political landscape. Nobody knows the modus operandi and the data collation procedures of TI. Publication of these reports thus mostly serves the purpose of the opposition to taint the governments especially in third world countries. During the 1990s TI reports were used against democratic governments and eventually to justify [General] Musharraf’s military takeover in October 1999.”

He very correctly points out that “Transparency International has a local chapter in every country where it literally out-sources the task of compiling reports. The task is to interview local businessmen who first safeguard their business concerns, revitalize their vital connections, and try to milk these reports as much in their favour as possible.

Like all developing countries, Pakistan too is faced with growth pangs, one them being corruption. It is the nature of the beast and even countries like Canada are not free of this aspect of the ‘free market’ principles of capitalism. Former Prime Ministers have been exposed as receiving hundred of thousands of dollars in brown envelopes. Bribes by their nature have two parties involved—the giver and the taker, both equally complicit in corruption.

The fact that the Punjabi elite dominates all major businesses in Pakistan allows for a certain ethnic chauvinism, which then affects the compilation of these Transparency International reports and opinion surveys. However, it is only downright racism that suggest when a Punjabi politician imports a Siberian Tiger, he is an animal lover, but if Sindhi politician feeds his horse an apple, he is a guilty of corruption.

As Wasiq Ali writes, “Interestingly the business elite which mostly hails from Punjab has brought the country to the brink of Balkanization by concentrating prosperity in one province while distributing misery around the country.

This elite practically controls all resources of the country, mostly resides in Northern and Central Punjab and has often been the cause of major upheavals in the checkered history of Pakistan.”

Pakistan broke up in 1971 due to the arrogance and racism of the country’s Punjabi elites towards dark-skinned Bengalis of East Pakistan. Today the next generation of Punjabi ruling class should recognize that if they do not recognize their faults, what is left of Pakistan will also splinter into many fragments leaving their prosperity landlocked and surrounded by hostile neighbours with wounded prides.

The racist nature of Pakistan’s politics. Where Punjabis govern with a sense of entitlement over Sindhis and Baloch.

(Note- Tarek Fatah is a highly respected Canadian commentator who has fearlessly confronted Islamic extremism in recent years.)

 Another write up by Tarek Fatah about racism in Islam Pakistan & Bangladesh

National Post: Racism in Islam, Pakistan and Bangladesh

By  http://vladtepesblog.com/?author=1 -  | May 7, 2009

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=1540065 - Published: Tuesday, April 28, 2009

The following is an edited excerpt of a speech delivered last week at the Durban Review Conference (Durban II) in Geneva, Switzerland.

As I speak to you, I am deeply disappointed that my colleague Milly Nsekalije, a survivor of the 1994 massacre of Rwandan Tutsis, could not share her story with all of you. The reason: In the eyes of some, she cannot have been a victim of the genocide since she is not 100% Tutsi.

What does it say about the state of racism in our world when the victims of a genocide practise exclusion on the basis of the so-called purity of blood lines and ethnicity?

Worse than her exclusion from to-day’s event is the fact that it has happened at a conference meant to combat racism. As this shows, we have turned the concept of racism upside down.

Racism operates not just as a black/ white divide, but also as a cancer that affects relations between people of colour — people who often share the same religion, but have different shades of brown or black skin.

This internalized racism, which devours the people of the developing world in Asia and Africa from within, is too often left out of the discussion of racism.

This afternoon, I would like to shed some light on two genocides — one happened in 1970-71 in what is now Bangladesh; and the other that continues as I speak in the Darfur region of Sudan. In both instances, the root of the problem lay with one group of Muslims feeling they were racially superior to their victims, who also happened to be Muslim. In both cases, the doctrine of racial superiority and the practice of institutional racism went unchallenged, even after the horrible consequences of such racism were evident and for all to see.

In 1970, my country of birth, Pakistan, was divided in two: an eastern part that is today known as Bangladesh and the western rump, which survived a subsequent war with India as the state we now know as Pakistan.

East Pakistan was inhabited by the darker-skinned Bengali people who happened to be the majority community of Pakistan, but found themselves ruled by a lighter-skinned minority from what was known as West Pakistan.

In the first 25 years of the country’s history, the racist depiction of the darker-skinned Bengalis as an inferior and incapable people became the unquestioned dogma among the ruling minority. The darker-skinned Bengalis’ culture was portrayed as un-Islamic and influenced by Hinduism. Their music, cuisine and attire were mocked, and their language was banned, leading to widespread protests and deaths in 1952.

In 1970, after suffering under the minority rule of West Pakistan for 25 years, the people of East Pakistan voted to elect a party based in their region, and gained a clear majority in the country’s national parliament.

However, the racist view that Bengali people were incapable of ruling the country, or that they were traitors to the fair-skinned minority of West Pakistan, led to a military intervention and widespread massacres over a 10-month period.

The killing of the Bengali people by the West Pakistan army stopped only when India intervened and defeated the Pakistan Armed Forces, but not before hundreds of Bengali intellectuals, professors, poets, authors, musicians and painters were rounded up and massacred.

All told, one million Muslims were murdered by fellow Muslims in an orgy of hate that defied the teachings of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, whose religious authority was being invoked by the Pakistan army.

One would have hoped that this genocide would have served as a cautionary tale. But the sad fact is that racism in the Islamic world has remained ubiquitous in the years that followed. Yet there is near universal denial about it, not just among the governments of Muslim nations, but also among many NGOs and civil society groups.

In Sudan, the Arab janjaweed militia and the Arab government in Khartoum have caused the murder of 500,000 Darfuri Muslims whose only fault is that they are black and thus considered inferior to the ruling classes of that country.

The mistreatment of black Muslims by those who feel they are superior because of their lighter skin colour has gone on throughout history. Only in the Middle East can one get away with addressing a black man as Ya Abdi, which translates as “Oh you slave.”

Only the Arab League would choose to embrace Sudan’s President, a man charged by the International Criminal Court for his murderous campaign in Darfur.

It is time that the medieval belief in the inferiority of non-Arab Muslims to Arab Muslims is laid to rest. Arab countries and leaders of Arab NGOs must denounce this doctrine, which has led to discrimination against darker-skinned Muslims by Arab governments in countries as far apart as Dubai and Darfur.

If we cannot allow a woman to speak here because she is of mixed blood, then all I can say is that in the words of Robert Frost, we have miles to go before we sleep. – Tarek Fatah is the author of the recent book Chasing Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State.

http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=7842 - http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=7842