Each Year, Over a Thousand Christian, Sikh, and Hindu Girls Convert to Islam in Pakistan

Paromita Das 

GG News Bureau

New Delhi, 31st May. Pakistan ranks in the top three nations in the world if it is true that being a minority in any nation might be illegal. Targets of the false narrative that “Islam is in danger” include Christians, Sikhs, and Hindus in Pakistan.

It will be challenging to locate even a single creature known as a minority there if this keeps up for a few more years. The globe is once again being made aware of concerns due to the most recent advances in this direction.

The Christians in Mujahid Colony of Sargodha, Punjab province, Pakistan, were attacked by a group of Islamic fanatics at the encouragement of a Maulvi.” The fundamentalists also burned down a 70-year-old Christian’s wood factory and beat him to death during this time. The incident also resulted in the injuries of numerous more Christians. The unfortunate aspect of this is that numerous videos of the attack show the police, who should be in charge of stopping these kinds of situations, there on the scene as a silent observer. This suggests that they are tacitly endorsing the terrorists who carried out the attack. and makes a point of offering convenience.

Every minority community in Pakistan is actually experiencing a crisis right now, but the Hindu and Christian populations are maybe the most affected. The Sikh community is still the focus after that. A report about this was also released last year, and it detailed the numerous threats and harassments that the Hindu residents of this area are subjected to. In the nation, murder, kidnapping, and attacks on minority groups’ places of worship have become frequent occurrences. Hindus made up 20.5% of Pakistan’s population in 1947; by 1998, that number had dropped to 1.6%. In the last 20 years, this number has decreased even more.

Only last month did the “Movement for Solidarity and Peace in Pakistan” release a report. The study includes statistics and the most recent instances of crimes committed against minorities.
Extensive research reveals a consistent pattern in instances of forced marriage and religious conversion. The kidnapper or a third party marries the girls, who are often abducted when they are between the ages of 12 and 25. The kidnappers, who are Muslims, submit a counter-FIR on behalf of the abducted girl when her family files a First Information Report of kidnapping or rape at the local police station. They claim that the married girl was coerced into marriage and that the abducted female was deliberately converted to Islam. There are claims that the girl’s family is harassing her and planning to convert her back to her old religion.

In the meantime, the girl is so terrified that, even when she is brought before a judge or court, the victim girl is so afraid that, in most cases, she appears to have testified that she converted to Christianity and was married of her own free will. As. In this way, the actual kidnapping episode that started it all vanishes. The analysis of ten representative examples in the report delves into these patterns of violence and injustices.

The majority of these situations include the girl staying under the abductor’s care while the case is being handled by the courts. The victim girl is also shown to be the victim of forced prostitution, rape, sexual assault, human trafficking and sale, and other forms of domestic abuse while in the abductor’s care. In addition, the report outlines the problem’s social and historical background as well as the particular complaints of Pakistan’s minority populations concerning the procedural, political, and legal safeguards in place to protect the human rights of the country’s religious minorities. The research also emphasizes the violent patterns that allow law enforcement and public opinion to support offenders’ impunity, as well as the complexity of the offenses that make it challenging to identify crimes that are specifically related to a person’s religious identity. Within this background, data from the US Commission on International Religious Freedom is currently accessible to the public and demonstrates the appalling state of affairs for Christians, Sikhs, and Hindus in Pakistan. In Pakistan, about a thousand females who identify as Hindu, Sikh, or Christian are converted annually. The number of conversions of minority females alone grows by more than a thousand times if we look at cases of general religious conversion in addition to this official figure.

Christians and Hindus are two examples of minorities in Pakistan who are frequently accused of blasphemy, tried for it, and found guilty. In Pakistan, defaming the Prophet is punishable by death or life in prison under Section 295C, while using or insulting a copy of the Quran or any quotation from it is punishable under Section 295B. Does it for any illegal purpose or in an abusive manner? Pakistan’s constitution stipulates that he will be imprisoned for life.

The oppression of Pakistan’s minority population, including Christians, Sikhs, and Hindus, is well documented in Farahnaz Ispahani’s book Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan’s Religious Minorities. Ispahani served as the then-president of Pakistan’s media advisor from 2008 to 2012.

In order to bolster their electoral base, she holds Pakistan’s presidents and Prime Ministers accountable for initiating a gradual genocide against the nation’s minorities.

Saying that Pakistan implies “pure land,” she explicitly accuses Pakistan Army General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the nation’s sixth president, of founding a terrorist organization that targets Shias, Ahmadis, Hindus, and Christians. I have explained in my book, via the use of historical documents, how Pakistan, a Muslim-majority state that aspired to be a secular state, ended up being what it is not supposed to be. There were 23% non-Muslims in Pakistan in 1947 when the country was still being constituted; now, there is hardly any sign of us. Minorities have therefore undergone conversion.

That conversion that has occurred, she claims, is not the fault of any one nation or individual. Here, the plan is being used to convert every member of the religious minority. This is what I refer to as drip-drip genocide. Usually, when one discusses the Holocaust, one either brings up Nazi Germany or Yugoslavia. This genocide in Pakistan is happening slowly; it’s happening over a long period of time, like droplets slowly dropping from a pot—drip, drip, drip. It is astonishing that in spite of this knowledge, powerful nations that support human rights, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, as well as international organizations, remain mute.