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Religious Minorities Continue to Suffer in Pakistan

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The Pakistani government is content to spout platitudes and holiday greetings to religious minorities, but continues to turn a blind eye to forced conversions and atrocities against them. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan tweeted “Wishing all our Hindu community a happy Diwali,” but his government has a dismal record in safeguarding its minority communities, including Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs.

 

Nearly 1,000 girls from religious minorities (most of them minors) are forced to convert to Islam in Pakistan each year, and forcibly married to much older men.

 

As recently reported in Dawn, a  parliamentary committee in Pakistan rejected an anti-forced conversion bill, with Pakistani Religious Affairs Minister Noorul Haq Qadri saying the “environment is unfavorable” for formulating a law against forced conversions. 

 

Global Strat View reached out to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) for comment on forced conversions in Pakistan. In an email response, they said,  “The issue of abduction, forced conversion to Islam, rape, and forced marriage remained an imminent threat for religious minority women and children, particularly from the Hindu and Christian faiths. During 2020, USCIRF documented incidents of forced marriages, more than half involving minors. The government did little to ensure minor girls’ safety and return to their families. Authorities often do not take any action, and in abduction cases that are brought to the courts, officials have claimed that victims willingly converted to Islam. The head of the Parliamentary Committee on Forced Religious Conversions, Senator Anwarul Haq Kakar, claimed that most cases of forced conversion “have some degree of willingness on the part of the girl.” 

 

USCIRF further said that “Pakistani courts systematically failed to protect and provide justice to victims, who are often forced to testify that they converted voluntarily to protect themselves and their families from further harm. In April, Myra Shahbaz, a 14-year-old Christian schoolgirl, was abducted at gunpoint. Despite Myra telling police she was drugged, raped, and forced to sign papers her abductor later used to allege that she was 19 and had voluntarily married and converted, the court ordered that she be returned to her abductor.”

 

USCIRF’s 2021 Annual Report chapter on Pakistan, addresses forced conversion in further detail. On the recommendation of USCIRF, the U.S State Department re-designated Pakistan as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, as amended, for having engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom.

Secretary Blinken Shows Support for Religious Freedom, Tibet

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New Delhi – In his first visit to India as Secretary of State, Antony Blinken kicked off a packed schedule of meetings on Wednesday July 28, with a show of support to the Tibetan cause. Secretary Blinken met with Ngodup Dongchung, a representative of the Dalai Lama and member of the Central Tibetan Administration (Tibetan government in exile).

Blinken’s first engagement was a Civil Society Roundtable with the theme “Advancing Equitable, Inclusive, and Sustainable Growth and Development.” In his opening remarks at the Roundtable, Blinken stressed upon the shared values and beliefs of the Indian and American people, including human dignity, equality of opportunity, the rule of law, and freedom of religion and belief. “We believe that all people deserve to have a voice in their government and be treated with respect no matter who they are,” said Blinken.

Blinken commented that both democracies are works in progress. “As friends, we talk about that, because doing the hard work of strengthening democracy and making our ideals real is often challenging. We know that firsthand in the United States, where we aspire to be, in the words of our founders, a more perfect union. That’s an acknowledgement from day one of our country that in a sense we will always fall short of the mark, but that the way to make progress is by constantly trying to achieve those ideals. As I said before, sometimes that process is painful, sometimes it’s ugly, but the strength of democracy is to embrace it,” added Blinken.

Participants in the discussion included Geshe Dorji Damdul, the Delhi-based Director of Tibet House; constitutional lawyer Menaka Guruswamy; Inter-Faith foundation founder Khwaja Iftikhar Ahmed; and representatives of the Baha’i, Sikh and Christian communities among others.