Inside a Hindu temple in a shanty area in Pakistan’s Karachi city, Anum Agha wearing the traditional Muslim Hijab greets her students with ‘salaam’ and gets a loud ‘Jai Shri Ram’ in response.
Anum runs a school inside the temple in the Basti Guru area of the southern port city. The school is situated in the middle of an informal Hindu settlement which is facing constant threats from land grabbers.
But Anum is determined to impart knowledge about education, health and basic rights to the children of the minority community. In the settlement, 80 to 90 Hindu families live in a close cluster of wooden huts and some semi-constructed houses.
One can see Anum holding discussions with children of the settlement after her classes are over.
“Everyone is surprised when I tell them about our school inside this temple but we had no other place to hold our classes when I first started coming here last year,” she told PTI.
The classes are conducted in the main area of the temple. The walls of the temple
are plastered with posters of Hindu deities and statues of Hindu Gods placed up on a higher perch.
The lack of basic facilities is noticeable as one moves around the settlement located in Rehman Colony near Mahmoodabad but for land grabbers, it is not an ordinary piece of land.