It is surprising to see the outrage, especially in India, after an eight-year-old Hindu boy was charged with blasphemy, and a Hindu temple was ransacked in Pakistan.
The culture of impunity towards religious minorities in Pakistan has always been somehow ignored or overlooked by the powerful votaries of liberty and freedom in India.
Not many know that unlike in India, a Pakistani citizen belonging to a minority religious community cannot even dream of assuming the highest office. The discrimination is rooted in its Constitution. The Constitution of Pakistan forbids them from becoming the president or the prime minister of the country. Expecting equality for all citizens of Pakistan is itself a misplaced idea.
Imagine a country where ‘posing’ as a Muslim is a crime attracting severe punishment. Can anything be more ludicrous?
Pakistan is a country where the charge of blasphemy mandatorily invites a death sentence. It’s a nation-state in the 21st century where on an average, by a conservative estimate, a minority community girl is abducted, raped, and converted to Islam every day, with hardly any help from the law enforcement agencies or from the judiciary to the victim or her family, as media reports prove.
It’s a nation where a man called Mian Mithhu enjoys the cult status for being a “one-man Hindu-to-Muslim conversion factory of Pakistan”, and who evokes raw fear among the Hindu population already living under wretched conditions. There is a deep-seated anti-minority syndrome that runs across Pakistan.
In the most recent case of temple attack in Rahim Yar Khan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the top leaders of the Milli Yakjehti Council — an alliance of 22 religious and political parties and organisations — even declined to condemn the vandalism and desecration.
The specter of violent harm, loss of life, and loss of dignity is a reality present throughout Pakistan. Hindus are not alone in this, though. The Sikhs, Ahmadiyyas, and Christians share this plight.
In January 2020, Gurdwara Nanakana Sahib, one of the most revered holy spots of Sikhs, was ransacked by a Muslim mob. In September, the daughter of a granthi of the gurdwara was forcefully abducted and converted to Islam. The family fled Pakistan in deep fear and disgrace.
The politics of competitive bidding of bounties, as in the case of Aasia Bibi, reflects criminal perversion that is neck-deep in Pakistan’s social systems, supported strongly by the establishment.
All this happening in the name of performing “Islamic duty” only begets the perpetrators’ social approval and the religious license for such heinous acts.
The organised humiliation of minorities, rape, abduction and forced conversion has societal approval and express support of the political class.
Minorities in Pakistan: A life in a state of fear psychosis
The Centre for Democracy, Pluralism and Human Rights (CDPHR), in its report, said: "Minorities in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan are forced to lead lives which are perpetually under siege. Theoretically, Pakistan's Constitution provides equal rights to all citizens, but these are only on paper. Religious minorities - Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Ahmadiyyas, even Shias, are treated as non-citizens. They are people without a voice; people without any constitutionally or legally protected rights."
It added: "Minorities are stateless in the State of Pakistan. Punjab-dominated military-politician complex violates human rights not only of religious minorities but also of Balochs and Hazaras."
According to the 1998 census of Pakistan, the only official data on the minority population available, according to a report in The Indian Express, Hindus constituted 1.6 percent of the country’s population. The last census that took place in 2017 did not have the data on minorities.
Pakistan is a hotspot of forced conversion. Around 1,000 girls are forcibly converted and married to their abductors every year, an Associated Press report said in 2020. The tragic reality of these women is scary. After the initial one or two years, only few remain married. The rest are trafficked, sold into prostitution, reports say.
According to a report by the Peoples Commission for Minorities’ Rights and the Centre for Social Justice, there were 156 incidents of forced conversions of minor girls (as young as 12 years) between 2013 and 2019.
A total of 29 blasphemy cases were slapped against the minorities since Imran Khan became the PM.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) had expressed concerns when Hindus and Christians were denied food amid the Covid-19 outbreak in Pakistan.
In June this year, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists said attacks on journalists have only increased under the Imran Khan government.
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), in a white paper on global journalism, listed five countries, including Pakistan, as the most dangerous in the world for the practice of journalism, with 138 journalists killed since 1990.
According to a report, more than 10,000 Hindu, Christian, Sikh girls have been “stolen” since 2011 and denied their basic human rights.
What should be worrisome to the global community is the meek surrender of the Pakistani judiciary. “In almost all the cases involving Hindus, the judiciary has ultimately given in to the pressure by the local clerics and Islamists. The trend is evident from the Rinkle Kumari case from 2012 when almost every level of judiciary ignored that the Hindu girl was a minor and thus, her marriage was illegal. Despite her begging and crying in the court, all the courts sent her back to her abductor,” The Daily Excelsior reported.
“In 2019, the Islamabad High Court, despite noticing that the conversion and marriage of two sisters from a poor Hindu family looked staged, ultimately allowed the conversion and the marriage legal. In February 2020, the Lahore High Court allowed Muslim men to marry minor girls who had their first menstrual cycle. The order came in a matter where a 14-year-old Christian girl was abducted, raped, and made pregnant by her abductor. The Court refused to consider her age stating that under Sharia law, she was old enough to marry as she had her first period. In August 2020, another court returned a 14-year-old Christian girl to her abductor,” it added.
“The law is clear that sexual intercourse with a girl below 16 years of age is statutory rape and there is no defence. Yet the law enforcement and judiciary are influenced into inaction by the production of a conversion certificate and a nikahnama (marriage contract),” the report said.
‘A country of particular concern’
In the last 18 months itself, eight Hindu temples in Pakistan have been attacked and damaged. The extent of religious intolerance can be understood by the fact that the construction of Islamabad’s first Hindu temple in July last year faced violent opposition from politicians, sections of the media, and the ulema. A mob was organised to tear down its boundary wall.
A South Korea-based Pakistani human rights activist, Rahat Austin, recently brought this story before the world where a group led by one Muhammad Ali Nawaz barged into the house of a Hindu villager in Sindh’s Tharparkar district, thrashed the family, raped his 15-year-old daughter, and later abducted her to keep as a sex slave.
Furthermore, a militant Islamist group demanded a ransom of Rs 50 lakh or a woman from the family of a Hindu cobbler who it abducted and threatened to kill him and hang his body from a tree if the demand was not met.
No wonder that Knox Thames, who served as the US State Department Special Advisor for Religious Minorities during both the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations wrote that in the face of deep-seated repression confronting the Ahmadiyyas, as well as Shia, Christians, Hindus, and even the reform-minded Sunnis, the Trump administration rightly designated Pakistan “a country of particular concern”.
In Pakistan, madrassas have played a key role in forced conversion, and in Sindh, some madrassas have become infamous for facilitating such conversions. For example, the Bharchundi Sharif shrine and madarsa and Pir Ayub Jan's madarsa are notorious for promoting and facilitating conversions to Islam, according to a report in The Conversation, the world's leading publisher of research-based news and analysis.
Conversion to Islam is a one-way process. Once a person becomes Muslim — forcibly or voluntarily — then going back will be an act of apostasy, which is punishable by death in Islam under penal law. There is no way for a person to go back due to an imminent danger of being killed.
In his address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11 August 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah promised that “in course of time, Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State”.
The hypocrisy of the Father of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who founded the country on the basis of religion alone, is self-evident, and therefore, the path on which Pakistan finds itself is hardly a surprise. The question is how the world will handle it or will it let the minorities suffer in constant pain and horror, lamenting why they were born there.
(Rahul Kashyap is a former journalist. He is a noted public affairs and international relations expert.)
[Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs, and views expressed by the various authors and forum participants on this website are personal and do not reflect the opinions, beliefs, and views of ABP News Network Pvt Ltd.]