In latest incidents of crimes against minority Hindus in Pakistan, a woman and two teenage girls from the Hindu community were allegedly abducted, forcibly converted, and married to Muslims in Pakistan's Sindh province.
In the first case, a 14-year-old girl Hindu girl was allegedly kidnapped in Nasarpur area in Sindh.
In the second case, a teenage Hindu girl was kidnapped while returning from the market in Mirpurkhas town in Sindh.
In the third case, a married Hindu woman —a mother of three children— went missing in Mirkhaspur. Her family later complained that she had been converted and married to a Muslim man when she returned.
In the case of the married woman, the police have refused to register an FIR on the complaint of the woman’s husband Ravi Kurmi. The police quoted the woman as saying that she converted and married the Muslim man on her own.
However, the police said that all of the three cases are under investigation.
The abduction and forcible conversion of young Hindu girls have become a major problem in the interior of Sindh province which has a large Hindu population in Thar, Umerkot, Mirpurkhas, Ghotki and Khairpur areas. Most of the Hindu community members are labourers.
In June, teenage Hindu girl Kareena Kumari told a court in Karachi that she was forcibly converted to Islam and married to a Muslim man.
In March, three Hindu girls –Satran Oad, Kaveeta Bheel, Anita Bheel– were abducted, converted to Islam and married to Muslim men within eight days.
In another case on March 21, Pooja Kumari was brutally shot dead outside her home in Rohri, Sukkur. Apparently, a Pakistani man wanted to marry her but she refused and he and two of his accomplices opened fire on her a few days later.
On July 16, 2019, the issue of abducting and forcibly converting Hindu girls in various districts of Sindh province was taken up in the Sindh Assembly, where a resolution was debated and unanimously passed after it was modified over objections of certain lawmakers that it should not be restricted to Hindu girls only.
However, the bill which criminalised forcible religious conversions was later rejected in the assembly. A similar bill was again proposed but rejected last year.
The Associated Press in 2020 reported that around 1,000 girls are forcibly converted to Islam every year. It noted that most of the converted girls are impoverished Hindus from Sindh province.
(With PTI, AP inputs)
