The Sikh community living in Pakistan raised serious concerns about its well being on Friday, after it was forced to convert to Islam by a government official in the nation’s Hangu district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
While lodging a complaint against these forced conversions with the Deputy Commissioner Hangu Shahid Mehmood, the Sikhs claimed that Assistant Commissioner Tehsil Tall Yaqoob Khan was the person behind this exercise. The complaint was filed by a person named Farid Chand Singh.
The complaint claimed that the residents of Doaba area are being tortured regularly and demanded that the issue be investigated so that the community can live in Pakistan with love, peace, and harmony. The complaint claimed that the Pakistani constitution empowered the Sikhs to defend their religious belief and wanted the Deputy Commissioner to summon the accused Tall Yaqoob Khan.
The Deputy Commissioner though tried to defend his colleague by claiming that there was no such issue of forcibly converting someone to Islam.
Such news of Sikhs being hounded comes after it has been reported time and again, about how Hindus have been one of the biggest victims of the conversion machinery prevalent in Pakistan.
Things have been so brazen that the population of the Hindus has shrunk from 23% in 1947 to just 6% in recent times. It has been reported that the Hindu girls are abducted, converted and forced to marry Muslims in the Islamic nation. Such a menace has been mostly targeted towards Hindus belonging to so called lower castes while the upper caste Hindus are mainly kidnapped for a ransom.
Besides outright conversion, the Pakistani establishment also seems to be using a divide and conquer technique against the Hindus.
We had reported how Pakistan had declared Dalits as a different religion from Hinduism in their census. In the column where one needed to indicate one’s religion, “Scheduled Castes” was one of the options apart from Hinduism. So, one had to either indicate himself as Hindu or a Dalit. He can’t be both.
Apart from such marginalisation, the Dalits are also known to discrimination and crimes like abductions and forced conversions by Muslim extremists.
