Do You Know About the Rat-Children of Pakistan?
Pakistan is the country where most of the people are ready to do anything in the name of religion. The rat children of Pakistan are a glaring example of it. If you have happened to spend some time in Pakistan and had the opportunity to travel through the country. It is quite probable that you would have seen some beggars wearing long robes with very small heads and flat foreheads that give them a look of some rodent. They are called the ‘Rats of Shah Dola’.
Shah Dola was a Sufi Saint of the subcontinent who lived during the era of the last Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. During his life, Shah Dola took care of mentally disabled children who were abandoned by their parents. These children used to beg in order to earn their keep.
It is said that saint Shah Dola could bless the childless couples with children but he had one condition, that the couple would donate (literally) their firstborn to his service. Blinded by the desperation, parents started giving their firstborn to him. His shrine is in the current day Gujrat city of Pakistan. Even after his death, childless couples kept coming to his shrine, begging him to bless them with children.
This practice is still going on and people still abandon their first child at his shrine. The administration of the shrine then put a heavy iron cap on the head of these children that stop the growth of their skull and brain. As a result, these children grow up looking like a rat and have mental disabilities.
These children are then sent to all parts of the country to beg. Beggar mafia even hires them on a monthly contract basis and they are given back to the shrine administration after the contract expires. These children and grown-ups spend their lives begging. They don’t have any family or life of their own. Due to their mental disabilities, they are bound to depend on others.
It had been going on for centuries now. In the 1960s, the government of Pakistan took control of the shrine and banned people from leaving their newborn babies at the shrine but due to unstable political conditions, the authorities had to leave it in the hands of the old traditional administration.
No efforts were made to ban this practice after that. This whole thing is still working because common citizens never refuse to give money to the rats of Shah Dola, it is strongly believed that if you refuse them, your children will become handicapped. So for the begging mafia, these poor souls are a guarantee of regular income. Many national and international media outlets have brought this issue to light but nothing seems to work so far.