AGRA, INDIA, July 21, 2001: The India-Pakistan summit in Agra has raised new hopes among the Pakistani Sindhi Hindu migrants living in that city that the event may enable them to carry out trade with and travel to their former homeland. The city of Agra has nearly 60,000 Sindhi Hindus who fled to India from Pakistan after the violent partition of 1947. A community leader, Lal Chand Soni, says most Sindhis now have a comfortable home and profitable business — trading in cloth, owning grocery stores and engaged in the shoe trade. Pakistan’s Sindh province of Pakistan is the cradle of the Indus valley civilization and the Sindhi migrants have preserved their distinct cultural heritage. They have built their own temples and celebrate their own festivals. The older generation still uses the Arabic script and are more fluent in Urdu and Persian than Hindi, which is the local language.
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