Taliban to force Hindus to wear identity labels in Islamic Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Afghanistan's Taliban leaders - already isolated by their harsh brand of Islam and poor treatment of women - have announced plans to make Hindus wear an identity label on their clothing to distinguish them from Muslims.

The Taliban, which that controls 95 per cent of this poor Central Asian state, plans to enforce the edict soon, Mohammed Wali, religious police minister, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. However, an exact date had not been set, and Wali added that the Taliban also had not settled on the exact label Hindus would be required to wear.

The law will also make it mandatory for Hindu women to veil themselves - just like Muslim women of Afghanistan, Wali said.

The edict - reminiscent of the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany - prompted an angry statement from Hindu-dominated India.

"We absolutely deplore such orders which patently discriminate against minorities," Raminder Singh Jassal, an Indian foreign ministry spokesman, told reporters in New Delhi. "It is further evidence of the backward and unacceptable ideological underpinning of the Taliban."

In the central Indian city of Bhopal, dozens of protesters from the Hindu fundamentalist group Bajrang Dal marched Tuesday, shouting angry slogans and carrying an effigy of a Taliban soldier with a beard and a green scarf. "Taliban, die!" some chanted.

The National Volunteers Corps, a fundamentalist movement that is the ideological parent of India's governing Hindu nationalist party, condemned the Taliban.

"It is in line with the Taliban's interpretation of Islam, a religion which divides humanity into two: the believers and the infidels," said Baburao Vaidya, a spokesman for the corps, known by its Hindi acronym RSS.

"We criticize the very fundamentals of Islamic tenets," he said.

The labelling decision could further isolate the fundamentalist Taliban, already under fire from the West for alleged discriminatory policies toward ethnic and religious minorities, human rights abuses and poor treatment of women.

In recent years, many Hindus and other members of religious minorities have left Afghanistan because of Taliban policies.

There are at least 5,000 Hindus living in Kabul. Thousands of other Hindus live in other Afghan cities, but there are no reliable figures on exactly how many.

The new law will be meant for only Hindus because there are no Christians or Jews in Afghanistan and Sikhs can be easily recognized by their turbans, Wali said. However, at least one Jew is known to live in the Afghan capital of Kabul and there may also be some Christians.
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