The authorities in Peshawar which is in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, arrested a 72-year-old man for attempting to marry a 12-year-old girl. An attempt to marry the juvenile was thwarted by the cops in Charsadda who also apprehended the Nikkah Khwan (a person who solemnizes the marriage). The girl’s father, Alam Syed, had consented to sell her to the man for PKR 500,000, according to the police. However, the cops interfered shortly before the Nikah (Islamic wedding ceremony) and took the septuagenarian, identified as Habib Khan, and the Nikah Khwan into custody.
A case under the Child Marriage Act has been filed against the two along with the minor’s father who managed to abscond from there. An estimated 30% of girls in Pakistan get married before the age of 18, making it one of the countries with the highest rates of child marriage worldwide. The legal age of marriage is 16, but enforcement remains a challenge. The Child Marriage Restriction Act of the British era established the minimum age for marriage, but the maximum punishment of one month in jail and a fine of Rs 1,000 is considered to be insufficient to discourage offenders.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province where the attempted marriage occurred, is one of two provinces that haven’t enacted more robust legislation to address child marriage. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) reported that 18.9 million Pakistani girls tie the knot before they reach 18 years of age and 4.6 million get married before they turn 16. In similar incidents. an 11-year-old girl in Rajanpur, Punjab, was pressured to wed a 40-year-old man while another young girl was compelled to marry a 50-year-old landlord in Thatta, Sindh. However, both were saved by the timely intervention of law enforcement officials.
A 70-year-old man was detained by the authorities on 6th May for marrying a 13-year-old girl in Swat. The marriage was organised by her father. When the authorities learned of the situation, they moved swiftly to arrest the two men. The underage girl was sent to the hospital for her medical examination and the Nikah Khwan along with witnesses of the ceremony were also nabbed.
No country for Hindu girls
The Pakistani authorities make a concerted effort to protect young Muslim girls from the terrible fate of marrying much older men at a young age. However, minorities, particularly Hindus, are not accorded the same privileges. In the Islamic nation, minor girls from minority communities like Hindus and Sikhs are regularly abducted, forcibly converted and married by Muslims, who prepare fake documents claiming the girls are over 18 years old and they have consented to the conversion and the marriage. Even after the victim girls tell the truth, the authorities and the courts don’t trust them, but rely on the forged documents to send the girl back to the abductors.
On 13th June, a startling story from Pakistan’s Karachi region surfaced about the kidnapping of a 16-year-old Hindu girl and her forced marriage to a young Muslim man. She was abducted by Sameer Ali, son of Gul Hassan, who lived in the town of Shahdabkot and was forcefully converted to Islam as well as given a new name ‘Hameeda’ after conversion. He successfully managed to present her as a 19-year-old adult in the submitted affidavit and claimed that she married him out of love and her own free will.
He pressured her to sign the document which read, “I have not been abducted by anyone to perform this marriage and I am giving this affidavit in my full senses without any force, pressure, or undue influence that I am going to solemnize my marriage with Sameer Ali with my personal decision without any force by anyone.”
Last year, Sohana Sharma Kumari, a 14-year-old girl, was taken away from her house in the Sindh province’s Benazirabad area. Her tutor and his assistants abducted her at gunpoint in front of her mother and her father Dilip Kumar reported the occurrence to the authorities. Afterwards, she appeared in a video and disclosed that she had converted to Islam and wed a Muslim man under pressure while her parents countered that she was still underage.
The cops recovered her from a house in the district after five days following much social media outrage. She was taken to the Larkana district court where she made a statement to the judge asserting she had been kidnapped and coerced into becoming a Muslim. She also stated that she wanted to go back to her parents. Nonetheless, the judge sent her to a women’s shelter home and postponed the case to a later date since it seemed as though she was under “pressure” while narrating her ordeal.
It is noteworthy that in numerous instances of this kind, the victim girls have expressed a desire to return to their parents, however, Pakistani courts place them in foster homes instead. Her father also told the media that all the documents produced by the accused to prove that she had embraced Islam and married a Muslim of her own free will were fake. “I don’t know how government officials can stamp such documents when the girl is 14 years old,” he stated.
Reshma, a Hindu girl from the Bagri group in the Garhi Sabhyo district of Sindh province, was abducted in 2020 and later revealed to be married to a Muslim male named Dil Murad Chandio. She and her spouse appeared before a court in Dera Allahyar, where she alleged that she was over 20 years old and married the man voluntarily and without any duress or compulsion. She added that her name was changed to Basheeran after she converted to Islam.
Her testimony was considered by the judicial magistrate, who granted her permission to remain with her spouse. Her parents, however, lodged a complaint at the Jacobabad Sadar police station. According to the girl’s parents, the man abducted their daughter, married her against her will and then pushed her to become a Muslim but the court legitimised their union and authorised them to stay together.
Kidnapping and forced conversions of young Hindu girls in the interior of Sindh have become a menace for Hindu families. Such cases have increased dramatically in interior Sindh in recent times with aggrieved parents flooding lower courts with applications demanding justice and the return of their daughters, sisters and spouses. Pakistan Darawar Ittehad (PDI), a minority organization, even arranged a protest demonstration in March 2023 from the Karachi Press Club to the Sindh Assembly Building. Several affected families participated in the event from their rural areas.
The President of the PDI, Shiva Kachhi, unveiled that although the group made an effort, it was unusual for a Hindu girl to be returned to her family because the police were generally unwilling to assist them. “There have been dozens of cases since last year and most of these girls are underage be it Sheela Meghwar, who was abducted from Mirpur Mathelo in Ghotki on March 19 this year, Chanda Maharaj, Simran Kumari, Pooja Kumari, Satran Oad, Kaveeta Bheel, Vijjya Kumari or Sohana now,” he mentioned.
He added that in one instance, the police disregarded a complaint even when the father of the kidnapped girl informed them that the person who held her hostage and forced her marriage already had two wives and four kids and worked as a labourer. “How can a 14-year-old girl decide to marry a man twice her age and already with two wives and who was a labourer,” he asked. Notably, Hindus are the largest minority group in Pakistan, although their numbers are rapidly declining owing to regular and repeated persecution.
The United Nations also expressed dissatisfaction with the ongoing crimes against women from minority communities in Pakistan on 11th April. A group of UN experts chastised the Islamic Republic for pressuring Christian and Hindu women into marriage and converting them to Islam, in a Geneva statement. which read, “Christian and Hindu girls remain particularly vulnerable to forced religious conversion, abduction, trafficking, child, early and forced marriage, domestic servitude, and sexual violence. The exposure of young women and girls belonging to religious minority communities to such heinous human rights violations and the impunity of such crimes can no longer be tolerated or justified.”
“Perpetrators often escape accountability with police dismissing crimes under the guise of ‘love’ marriages,” according to the experts. Furthermore, the UN press release stressed that child marriage, early marriage, or forced marriage are never acceptable. International law points out that if the victim is a minor (anyone under the age of eighteen), then consent in a marriage remains irrelevant. It noted, “A woman’s right to choose a spouse and freely enter into marriage is central to her life, dignity, and equality as a human being and must be protected and upheld by law.”
The UN urged Pakistan to uphold its international human rights obligations, ensure that those guilty of such violations are brought to justice and strengthen the implementation of current laws that protect against forced marriage as well as the abduction and trafficking of girls from the minority community.
Conclusion
Leaders of Hindu organizations have repeatedly voiced their opposition to girls from the community being kidnapped and converted to Islam. They charged that Sindh has become a hotspot for these kinds of crimes with Hindu females being abducted and brazenly converted to Islam under coercion as well as driven into marriage with their captors. All of it, though, has no impact on the authorities, as the situation continues to deteriorate at a rapid pace.
Honestly, these instances are not surprising considering the horrors inflicted on the marginalized minorities especially Hindus which struggle to survive in Pakistan on a daily basis by both its institutions and its individuals. However, one may anticipate a more passionate approach when it comes to the subject of crimes against children but this is not the case in Pakistan, where the people view all non-Muslims, including defenceless young Hindu girls, as inferior beings who deserve to suffer at the hands of their tormentors by virtue of their religion.
There, otherwise, can be no other justification for the impunity granted to the rapists and abductors, and the fact that legal institutions including the police and judiciary along with their media aid and abet such dangerous elements with blatant shamelessness despite overwhelming evidence and steadfast pleas from the families of the victims.
