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Pakistan
Index
During the British Raj, Sindh, situated south of
Punjab, was
the neglected hinterland of Bombay. The society was
dominated by
a small number of major landholders (waderas). Most
people
were tenant farmers facing terms of contract that were a
scant
improvement over outright servitude; a middle-class barely
existed. The social landscape consisted largely of
unremitting
poverty, and feudal landlords ruled with little concern
for any
outside interference. A series of irrigation projects in
the
1930s merely served to increase the wealth of large
landowners
when their wastelands were made more productive. Reformist
legislation in the 1940s that was intended to improve the
lot of
the poor had little success. The province approached
independence
with entrenched extremes of wealth and poverty.
There was considerable upheaval in Sindh in the years
following partition. Millions of Hindus and Sikhs left for
India
and were replaced by roughly 7 million muhajirs,
who took
the places of the fairly well-educated emigrant Hindus and
Sikhs
in the commercial life of the province. Later, the
muhajirs provided the political basis of the
Refugee
People's Movement (Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz--MQM). As Karachi
became
increasingly identified as a muhajir city, other
cities in
Sindh, notably Thatta, Hyderabad, and Larkana, became the
headquarters for Sindhi resistance.
In 1994 Sindh continued to be an ethnic battlefield
within
Pakistan. During the 1980s, there were repeated
kidnappings in
the province, some with political provocation. Fear of
dacoits (bandits) gave rise to the perception that
the
interior of Sindh was unsafe for road and rail travel.
Sectarian
violence against Hindus erupted in the interior in 1992 in
the
wake of the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya,
India, by
Hindu extremists who sought to rebuild a Hindu temple on
the
contested site. A travel advisory recommending that
foreigners
avoid the interior of the province remained in effect in
early
1994.
Data as of April 1994
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