Forced Conversions, Marriages Spike in Islamabad Authority
Sixteen-year-old Suneeta and her 12-year-old sister were walking home in March when they were kidnapped.
The men who took them forced the girls to convert to Islam.
“We were walking back to our house after working on the farm when men in a car came out of nowhere and dragged us in with them,” said Suneeta, who is Hindu and lives in Badin, a small city in the south of Pakistan. “The next thing we knew, we were in a shrine being forced to say the kalma (acceptance of Islam) by a cleric.”
The men who kidnapped the girls told their mother to pay the equivalent of $365 — an enormous amount for the poor farming family — or the men would marry off the girls.
Their mother begged and borrowed from within the Hindu community and paid the ransom. She got her girls back.
The family considers itself lucky.
Every year, thousands of Hindu and Christian girls and young women are kidnapped in Pakistan and forcibly married, disappearing from their families. And while these forced conversions have been going on for decades, a recent surge in reported cases has brought the issue back into the limelight.
Around 1,000 cases of Hindu and Christian girls being forced to convert were estimated in the province of southern Sindh alone in 2018, according to the annual report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
There are no concrete numbers for the rest of the conservative country, which is around 96 percent Muslim.
“This appears to be a systematic, organized trend and it needs to be seen in the broader context of the coercion of vulnerable girls and young women from communities that are already marginalized by their faith, class and socioeconomic status,” said Mehdi Hasan, chairperson of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. “The ugly reality of forced conversions is that they are not seen as a crime, much less as a problem that should concern ‘mainstream’ (Muslim) Pakistan.”
In the majority of these cases, the girls are under 18. And while marriage under the age of 18 is illegal in Pakistan, the law is often ignored.
Meanwhile, there is no law banning forced conversions.
Child advocates say there is a clear lack of will by the government to tackle the problem.
“The government has done little in the past to stop such forced marriages,” the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said in its annual report. “(The executive branch) asked lawmakers to pass effective legislation to end the practice,” the report added, but nothing happened.
Meanwhile, the parents of victims are often ignored by authorities and have few options, say civil rights activists.
“Injustice is being done … and there is no one here to listen to these poor people,” said Veeru Kohli, a human rights activist based in Sindh. “I’ve lost count of the number of cases that have come up every month.”
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