Never Again But… – Mini Holocausts in South Asia |
In December 2024, I visited the sites of the Holocaust—Treblinka, Auschwitz, the ghettos of Jewish resistance, and the killing fields of Karkawa in Poland. When I set foot on the soil of Treblinka, it felt as though the blood had been shed only recently and the mass graves had just been dug. It was as if the Holocaust had happened yesterday—the memory and the wound still painfully fresh.
Six million Jews—men, women, and children—were wiped from the face of the earth simply because they were Jews. Others who were targeted included the Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, the disabled, pregnant women, and countless innocent civilians.
Although these events took place in the fourth decade of the twentieth century—a period often associated with progress and enlightenment—the world’s most prominent leaders remained largely silent. Figures such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, along with religious authorities like the Pope, did not raise their voices forcefully enough against the genocide unfolding in Europe. Across Germany and Poland, concentration camps operated while much of the world looked away.
Had global leaders, scientists, intellectuals, scholars, writers, and poets—aside from a few exceptions like Bertolt Brecht and George Orwell, and those involved in the ghetto uprisings—united in opposition to Adolf Hitler and Nazism, perhaps the world would be a better place today. The phrase “Never Again” was not spoken loudly enough when it mattered most.
In South Asia, the Sindhi poet Shaikh Ayaz stands out for his tribute to Anne Frank and his condemnation of Nazism. Through his poetry, generations of Sindhi readers came to know the suffering of Anne Frank and the Jewish people.
To my deep sorrow, similar atrocities occurred under British colonial rule in India. The British established detention camps known as “Lorrha” (hedges) in Sindh, where the Hur community—followers of Pir Pagaro—were imprisoned. Men, women, and children were detained; many were born, lived, and died within barbed-wire enclosures. Hur men were subjected to torture, forced labor, and execution for resisting British rule. These camps continued until 1952, even after the British left the subcontinent following Partition. Their spiritual leader, Pir Pagaro Sibghatullah Shah, was executed.
Britain owes an apology for this Hur pogrom, just as it has acknowledged atrocities such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, when British troops opened fire on peaceful protestors opposing the Rowlatt Act.
Within a few years of the Holocaust, another tragedy of immense scale occurred during the Partition of India in August 1947. Around one million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were killed, and millions were displaced from their ancestral homes. Hundreds of thousands of women were abducted, raped, or forced into conversion. Families were torn apart, and many remain separated to this day across India and Pakistan.
Instead of condemning the Holocaust or drawing lessons from its horrors—especially the principle of “never again”—some nationalist pan-Islamist leaders appeared to take a very different message from those events.
One such instance was reported in Sindh, where a leader of the All-India Muslim League allegedly made a disturbing comparison during a party meeting. On March 22, 1941, the Home Secretary of Sindh province in undivided British India sent a confidential report to the central government. The report described an emergent meeting of the Muslim League held on March 6, 1941, at Khaliqdena Hall in Karachi.
The meeting was attended by two former ministers, G. M. Syed and Shaikh Abdul Majeed Sindhi, among others. According to the report, several emotional speeches were delivered. One speaker reportedly compared Hindus to the Jews of Germany and remarked that a similar fate awaited them.
Although the Home Secretary did not specify the name of the individual who made this particular statement, he did mention three speakers who addressed the gathering.
In 1971, another devastating episode unfolded in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), where millions of people were killed during Pakistan’s brutal military crackdown. This tragedy led to mass displacement and ultimately to the creation of Bangladesh after a war involving India and Pakistan. This was a worst genocide after the Holocaust.
In 1984, following the assassination of India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, widespread anti-Sikh violence erupted. Thousands of Sikhs were killed, their homes and places of worship destroyed, and women subjected to horrific violence.
Similarly, on September 30, 1988, coordinated attacks in Hyderabad, Sindh, killed around 300 people, mostly from Urdu-speaking communities. This event, remembered as “Black Friday,” was followed by retaliatory violence the next day in Karachi, where Sindhi-speaking civilians were targeted and killed. These cycles of violence deepened ethnic divisions and left lasting scars.
The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts, which killed over 250 people and injured more than 1,400, were linked to organized crime networks. Years later, in 2008, Mumbai was again attacked by terrorists targeting hotels, a train station, and a Jewish center, resulting in widespread casualties and international outrage.
On November 26, 2008, ten terrorists carried out coordinated attacks across Mumbai, targeting the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the Oberoi Trident Hotel, Leopold Café, Chabad House, and the busy Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station. The attackers were reportedly trained members of the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
According to former senior police official Tariq Khosa and other investigators, the terrorists entered India by sea, traveling from Thatta in Sindh, Pakistan. Armed with AK-47 rifles, grenades, and improvised explosive devices, they carried out a series of shootings and bombings that killed around 166 people and injured hundreds more.
Among the victims were six Americans, including Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his pregnant wife, Rivka, who were killed at the Chabad House. Reports indicated that the attackers were supported by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), though this has been a matter of international dispute.
The families of the Jewish victims filed a lawsuit in a federal court in New York against Pakistan, naming the ISI and its then–Director General, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani (often referenced in discussions of ISI leadership at the time), as defendants. Pakistan contested the case.
The lawsuit was represented by attorney James Kreindler, whose firm had previously pursued legal action against Libya on behalf of the families of victims of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 259 passengers and 11 people on the ground.
Nine of the ten attackers were killed during the operation by Indian commandos. The sole surviving attacker, Ajmal Kasab, was captured, tried, and convicted in India before being executed in 2012.
David Coleman Headley, an American citizen of Pakistani origin, was later convicted in a U.S. federal court in Chicago for his role in planning the Mumbai attacks and sentenced to 35 years in prison. During his trial, testimony indicated that the attackers had been directed by officers linked to Pakistani intelligence, and that Chabad House was specifically chosen as a target.
The case received extensive coverage in U.S. media.
The attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, where children were brutally killed, stands as another grim reminder of how violence against the innocent continues in different forms. Such acts echo the same inhumanity seen during the Holocaust.
The horrors of the Holocaust, the Partition, and subsequent tragedies continue to haunt the human conscience. They stand as stark reminders of humanity’s failure to uphold the promise of “Never Again.” Yet remembrance alone is not enough to confront or alleviate the suffering inflicted by fascism and hatred across the world.
In many countries, including my country of origin, Pakistan, children often grow up with little or no education about the Holocaust. Even up to the university level in many cases. Some may never even encounter the term. Among adults, misconceptions persist—ranging from denial of the Holocaust’s occurrence or scale to deeply troubling attempts to justify it.
There are also unsettling signs of dangerous ideologies resurfacing in unexpected places or conflict zones. For example, an IDF soldier told me during his testimony, when I visited the Nova massacre site, that during a raid they seized Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf, from the drawer of a doctor’s desk in his clinic in Gaza.
Similarly, in my own country, certain nationalist groups and some avidly read writers continue to glorify Adolf Hitler, portraying him as a figure worthy of admiration rather than condemnation.
I met a Holocaust survivor, Berthe Badehi, at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem in December 2024. I asked her how the world could be saved from a future Holocaust. She said, “I would utter one word: hope.” Had Anne Frank were alive she would hope.
There is also poetry by the twentieth-century Sindhi poet Shaikh Ayaz of Pakistan that carries a similar ray of hope. He wrote verses dedicated to Anne Frank:
Alas, Jewish daughter,What a life story you had.I have seen souls like you;Every winter, the roses perish.Oh Anne, my sister,Oh daughter of a distant land,While blood streams from my wounds,I can hear your sobs within it.