The abduction and forced conversion of two Hindu girls in Pakistan is another example of its attempts to infuriate India

This is a gross human rights abuse at so many levels — the abduction, conversion and marriage of two Hindu minor girls in Sindh district of Pakistan — that it merits not only India’s but the world’s concern. For it is about child abuse, possibly trafficking and slavery, a perverted suppression of free will, religious persecution of minorities and the propagation of a Salafi ideology-driven jihad of using women and girls as human shields to Islamise non-believers and for procreating a mass army of believers. Worse, use them to take care of the “needs” of jihadi warriors in conflict zones and birth their offspring. Considering that religious minorities comprise only about a minuscule three per cent of the Pakistani population with Hindus at one per cent, this would look like a systematic annihilation of that community. Had that nation really cared for preservation, it would have acted immediately on the complaints of the girls’ brother and father and not attempted to put out a doctored video of the victims saying they converted to Islam voluntarily. Pakistan is not just hosting terror havens; so radicalised are its civil structures at the dictates of the Army, which in turn draws its strength from ideological extremists, that it has insidiously linked the war outside to the war within. India, despite the provocation of Hindus, has at this point been very graded and mature in its reaction, sending out a note seeking suitable remedial action to protect and promote safety, security and welfare of minority communities. And though Pakistan’s Information Minister Chaudhry Fawad Hussain may have taken on External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj over the protection of minorities here, he would have done well to remember that their percentage is thriving and not as paltry as that of Hindus in Pakistan, amounting to 1.2 per cent. 

Truth be told, Pakistan’s raison d'être, of emerging as an Islamist State in opposition to a Hindu-dominated but a secular India, has dictated its policies no matter what its founding fathers felt. Its minorities have been under a siege for a long, long time. Pakistan even disowned the Ahmadis, declaring them non-Muslim by an official writ, and has been systematically targetting non-Muslim minorities such as Christians, Hindus and Sikhs, by destroying their identified neighbourhoods, attacking their faith shrines, killing them on trumped up charges to justify its cleansing efforts and converting them forcibly. Graves of Christians and Ahmadis have been vandalised while Hindus have been routinely kidnapped in Sindh and Balochistan provinces for ransom. Except now the forced ghettoisation is even more acute and anybody can be killed on the slightest pretext of blasphemy. In recent years, the number of Hindu persecuted returnees to India has been rising and the day is not too far when Hindu minorities won’t find a place in Pakistan. The abduction and conversion of Hindu women is not new either. Though the case of Rinkel Kumari is well-known with a lawmaker aiding her conversion and marriage, around 20-25 kidnappings and forced conversions of Hindu girls are reported from Sindh every month going by a report of the Asian Human Rights Watch. The selective targetting of Hindu girls, therefore, looks like another ruse to rile India. Then there’s Pakistan’s infamous blasphemy law which allows it to book any minority citizen as guilty of harming Islamic interests by suspicion. No charges, nothing. Just a rabid vigilantism couched as law, which is the strictest among proclaimed Islamic nations.  Asia Bibi, a poor Christian woman from Punjab, was the first woman in Pakistan’s history to be charged with blasphemy and sentenced to death, though acquitted now. In 2012, a Pakistani Christian girl, Rimsha Masih, was accused of blasphemy though her case was dismissed too. For long the Pakistani civil society is a subterranean presence, completely subverted and defanged by the Army and radicalised religious groups. The whole nation has been held hostage, not just the Hindu girls. And it is in Pakistan’s own interest to get back to civilities if it doesn’t want to be proscribed as a failed state.