Nor was he a stranger. Rachna’s family
knew and trusted him. He guarded the Hindu temple run by her father, an
important duty in a society where Hindus are often terrorized by Muslim
extremists, and he had helped Rachna cram for her ninth-grade final
exams.
After she disappeared from the market,
he did not demand a ransom. According to her family, he had an entirely
different purpose: to force her to convert to Islam and marry him.
In a country where Hindu-dominated India
is widely reviled as Enemy No. 1, Pakistan’s Hindu community endures
extortion, disenfranchisement and other forms of discrimination.
These days, however, Hindus are fixated
on a surge of kidnappings of teenage girls by young Muslim men who force
them to convert and wed. Pakistani human rights activists report as
many as 25 cases a month.
Most occur in the northern districts of
Sindh province, on the border with India and home to most of Pakistan’s
2.5 million Hindus. The Hindu community is shrinking as families flee
the area, which is run largely by Muslim feudal chiefs who own vast
tracts of farmland and wield wide influence over politics, law
enforcement and the courts.
Hindus say the forcible conversions
follow the same script: The victim, abducted by a young man related to
or working for a feudal boss, is taken to a mosque where clerics, along
with the prospective groom’s family, threaten to harm her and her
relatives if she resists.
Almost always, the girl complies, and
not long afterward, she is brought to a local court, where a judge,
usually a Muslim, rubber-stamps the conversion and marriage, according
to Hindu community members who have attended such hearings.
Often the young Muslim man is
accompanied by backers armed with rifles. Few members of the girl’s
family are allowed to appear, and the victim, seeing no way out, signs
papers affirming her conversion and marriage.
“In court, usually it’s just four or
five members of the girl’s family against hundreds of armed people for
the boy,” says B.H. Khurana, a doctor in Jacobabad and a Hindu community
leader. “In such a situation when we are unarmed and outnumbered, how
can we fight our case in court?”
Prominent Pakistani Muslims have joined Hindu leaders in calling attention to the problem.
President Asif Ali Zardari’s sister,
lawmaker Azra Fazal Pechuho, told parliament last month that a growing
number of Hindu girls are being abducted and held at madrasas,
or Islamic religious schools, where they are forcibly converted. She and
other lawmakers have called for legislation to prohibit the practice.
The issue was thrust into the spotlight
by the case of Rinkle Kumari, a 17-year-old Hindu girl from the town of
Mirpur Mathelo in the southern province of Sindh. The case was one of
three that recently went before Pakistan’s Supreme Court.
Kumari’s parents, who are not related to
Rachna’s family, allege that five men broke into their house in late
February, subdued Rinkle with a chloroform-soaked cloth and took her
away. The parents say the girl was forced to convert to Islam and marry
Naveed Shah, a neighbor.
Shah contends Rinkle acted willingly.
“She was not forced at all,” said Shah’s lawyer, Malik Qamar Afzal. “She embraced Islam freely, and afterward agreed to marry.”
The day after the alleged abduction and conversion, Rinkle was allowed to meet with her mother at a district court.
“She told me, ‘I have been kidnapped and
I want to go with you,’” recalled her mother, Sulchani Kumari. “She was
sobbing as she told me, ‘For God’s sake, take me away from that hell.’”
Hindu community leaders acknowledge that
in some cases, Hindu girls convert and marry Muslim men willingly.
Determining which cases involve coercion has been difficult for
authorities.
Asha Kumari, a 16-year-old Hindu girl
not related to Rinkle or Rachna, disappeared March 3 from a beauty
parlor in Jacobabad where she was taking a beautician’s course,
according to her brother, Vinod Kumar, 22.
Neither her family nor police could find
her until April 13, when she appeared before the Supreme Court,
accompanied by her new husband, Bashir Lashari.
Like Rinkle, she told the court she had willingly married and embraced Islam.
As in Rinkle’s case, the conversion took
place at a Sufi Muslim shrine run by the brother of Mian Abdul Haq, a
Muslim lawmaker with the ruling Pakistan People’s Party and a wealthy
landowner in northern Sindh.
“This is the way it always happens,”
said Vinod Kumar. “These girls are kidnapped, and then later they show
up in court and say they have converted.”
Hindu community leaders took the cases of Rinkle and Asha and that of a third Hindu woman all the way to the Supreme Court.
