The persecution of Pakistan’s religious minority communities persists. A recent report by the United Nations Human Rights Office has flagged that women and girls belonging to minority communities in the South Asian country continue to face abduction and forced religious conversion through marriage.
Girls and women from the Hindu and Christian communities were the most affected by the practice last year, according to the UN experts. The report also blamed the Pakistan government for failing to tackle the menace.
Let’s take a closer look.
Pakistan has a population of over 240 million (24 crore). Of this, 3.8 million (38 lakh), just 1.6 per cent, people are Hindus, and 3.3 million (33 lakh) Christians (1.37 per cent), according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2023 census.
The Muslim-majority country also has more than 19 million (1.9 crore) child brides. A concerning fact is that nearly one in six girls is married before the age of 18.
In Pakistan, the legal age of marriage is 18 for males and 16 for females. However, the Sindh province and the Islamabad Capital Territory have set the legal age to marry at 18 for both men and women.
Pakistan ranks sixth globally for “child brides”, girls married before the age of 18, according to a UN Women report in 2020-2021.
Every year, dozens of girls, mainly teenagers, from Pakistan’s Hindu and Christian communities are abducted, forcefully converted and sometimes married off.
Young girls and women in Pakistan’s minority communities are being kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam. As per the UN Human Rights Office report, in about 75 per cent of such cases last year, the affected girl or woman was Hindu, while the remaining 25 per cent were Christian.
Roughly 80 per cent of these incidents took place in the Sindh province. Most Pakistani Hindus live in Sindh, while the majority of Christians are in Punjab.
Teenage girls between the ages of 14 and 18 were mostly targeted, while some were even younger.
The UN experts warned that women and girls facing poverty and marginalisation are more vulnerable to this practice. These young females are often subjected to physical and sexual abuse, exploitation, social stigma and severe trauma.
“These women and girls endure a continuous sense of terror, face coercion and are deprived of their freedom of religion or belief and autonomy under patriarchal and political pressures. This must stop,” the experts said.
Notably, forced conversions and forced marriages are prohibited in Islam.
Speaking to Sapan News, Bhevish Kumar, a Hindu rights activist, said that there were various factors behind early marriages of girls from minority communities, such as poverty and lack of education.
He also pointed out that there was a perception that converting someone to Islam brings “sawab” (religious rewards).
According to South Asia Partnership-Pakistan’s 2015 report, Forced Conversion by Religion, impoverished areas in Sindh – Umerkot, Ghotki, Mirpur Khas, Sanghar, Tharparkar, and Jacobabad – are at the highest risk of such forced conversions.
The UN Human Rights Office report observed that the scale of the practice in Pakistan highlights systemic discrimination against non-Muslim women and girls who are coerced or compelled to convert to Islam to marry Muslim men.
“Any change of religion or belief must be genuinely free from coercion, and marriage must be based on full and free consent, which is not legally possible when the victim is a child,” the experts said.
The UN experts have called on the Pakistan government to step up efforts to halt the menace of forced conversions through marriage. They also accused the government of not taking adequate measures to weed out the root cause of the practice, such as gender inequality, poverty, social exclusion, religious bias against minorities, religious intolerance and rampant impunity.
“We are deeply concerned that law enforcement authorities often dismiss complaints lodged by victims’ families, fail to investigate or prosecute forced conversions in a timely manner, or neglect to properly assess the age of victims,” the experts said.
Pakistan does not have a law specifically addressing forced conversions, human rights activist Peter Jacob of the Center for Justice, Lahore, told last year.
Under Section 498-B of the Pakistan Penal Code, a convict can be sentenced up to 10 years in prison for forced marriages. However, this law is not applied to conversion cases, Jacob said.
The activist said a major problem is that marriage certificates in conversion cases are issued swiftly. In some cases, courts do not take into account official documents, such as the parents’ marriage certificate or the National Database and Registration Authority documents, proving the girl is under 18, but accept the instant certificate, he added.
Speaking to Sapan News, Veengas J, editor of The Rise News, Pakistan, said that when families file abduction cases and girls are recovered, the courts often deny access to their parents. However, the alleged abductors are permitted to meet the girls. Thus, manipulation of the girls continues.
She said even the police often initially refuse to register FIRs, and when they do, girls are not consistently returned to their families.
Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani of the Pakistan Hindu Council, a Karachi-based representative body of Hindus in Pakistan, told Al Jazeera in 2023 that while the number of cases of abductions and forced conversions is low, there is government inaction over the matter.
“The government has not shown willingness to initiate a legislation. So even when there is a single case, it is treated as if there are 10 cases, and it results in disrepute to the country,” he said.
“The absence of a [federal] law to prevent the situation leaves certain elements in society to take advantage. We need legislation to stop this.”
Source: Firstpost
