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Forced Conversion of Minorities: Myth of ‘Naya Pakistan’ Busted 

What’s the point of Pakistan signing ‘development’ contracts when its minorities live in terror?

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‘Abduction’ is a routine concern for common people, especially minorities in Pakistan. On the one hand, Baloch activists, students, youth and even women are made to ‘disappear’ by the security forces. On the other hand, religious fundamentalists are on an ‘abduction’ spree to convert Hindu and Christian minor girls to Islam.

The issue of abduction and immediate conversion ignited a public debate again when two minor Hindu girls were allegedly abducted, converted and married off in Sindh province. Let’s call the girls *Rima (14) and *Rusha (12).

The two Hindu sisters were reportedly abducted in Daharki city, Sindh, on Holi. Since then, the family has been holding protest near the local police station. The father of the Hindu girls was seen crying uncontrollably in front of a police station, saying, “You can kill me, I had (have) the patience, but now I won’t leave.”

Not just this, just a few days prior, a 35-year-old Christian woman was abducted, physically tortured and raped. The woman was identified as Saima Iqbal, as per this report. The police were slow in taking action. This isn’t the first time that such reports of abductions and forced conversions have appeared.

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Persecution of Minorities, Year After Year

Shockingly, there is no authentic data on the number of abductions of minors in Pakistan. However, according to an estimate in a report by South Asia Partnership-Pakistan (SAP-PK) released in collaboration with the Aurat Foundation, about a 1,000 women from Pakistan’s minority communities are abducted, raped, and forcefully converted to Islam every year. According to Amarnath Motumel, a senior lawyer with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), in 2012, at least 20 to 25 girls were kidnapped every month, who were made to embrace Islam.

According to the US-based World Watch List, Pakistan ranks as the fifth worst nation in the world in Christian persecution. Now, due to fear of abduction, many Hindus are not sending their girls to school.

In addition, overall conversion statistics are also on a surge. Such as the Jamia Binoria Madrassa in Karachi (infamous for conversion), claims to have converted 152 Christians, 147 Hindus, one atheist, two Buddhists, five ahmadiyyas, one Ismaili and one Kalash. According to some other reports, the places where Hindus, Christians and Shias are in the majority, there is a state-led effort to change the demography. Cases like the settlement of Punjabis and Sunni Muslims in other areas, and grabbing land on the pretext of development, are soaring throughout Pakistan.

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Mass Migration of Hindus From Pakistan to India

This type of discrimination and persecution have also fuelled the migration of Hindus from Pakistan to India. According to a Hindu parliamentarian in Pakistan in 2014, an estimated 5,000 Hindus migrate from Pakistan to India every year. According to Indian data, between 2011-2015, the Indian government had provided citizenship to 1,400 Pakistanis of whom an overwhelming majority is Hindu.

In the 194.9 million total population of Pakistan, Christians are the largest minority group that forms 1.8 percent, followed by Hindus at 1.6 percent, and Ahmadiyyas form 2.2 percent.

Others like Buddhists and Sikhs are very few, who comprise around one lakh an 30 thousand respectively. But no adverse effect is visible on the population of Hindus in Pakistan. The Hindu population in Pakistan was 15 percent in 1931, and 14 percent in 1941. After Partition, it declined to 1.3 percent in 1951, after which it steadily seemed to increase: 1.4 percent in 1961, 1.5 percent in 1981 and 1.6 percent in 1998.

But this steady increase in population does not reject the fact that minorities are being routinely persecuted and forced to convert religion in Pakistan. The ‘Naya Pakistan’ which is signing the much-hyped multibillion dollar projects like CPEC and BRI on the pretext of ‘development’, seems hollow on the inside.

(*Names changed to protect identity of minors)

(Anwar Ali Tsarpa is a research scholar at Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, JMI. He writes mostly on human rights and security issues in Pakistan. He can be contacted at @alianwarkgl. This is a personal blog and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)

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