The barbaric practice of abducting young girls, raping them, and converting them to Islam has become a common practice in democratic Pakistan where the state refuses to intervene on behalf of innocent victims.
Although the Constitution–Article 20– gives the right to profess, practice and propagate religion to every citizen, Christian, and Hindu young girls, and women remain out of its purview with the state and its various agencies, including high court judges, aiding the better of the heinous crime.
The media, civil society, and even most human rights groups willfully ignore this ignoble crime because the young girls are most often from poor, minority families.
Most of these crimes happen in villages and towns far off from the main cities.
So callous and indifferent has the society turned into that when a 15-year old Christian girl, asleep with her family, was taken away by a predator Muslim man in Faisalabad in 2022, there was no hue and cry, no edits were written, no protest marches took place and no one spoke against the culprits.
Parents ran crying to police, courts and anyone they thought would rescue their child but none came.
It is the same country and people who hold cities to ransom, force governments to kneel and make hue and cry over cartoons published in faraway countries.
The police are often hand in glove with the Muslim men; the judges are too eager to ratify bogus birth certificates and force the girls to accept their fate.
On August 4, 2020, for instance, the honorable Judge Raja Muhammad Shahid Abbasi of Lahore High Court, referring to the fake birth certificate of a Christian girl abducted, raped, and converted, said, “Our grandparents or parents tied the knot at a time when no marriage certificates were issued, but their marriages were considered valid”.
He decided in the favour of Muhammad Nakash Tariq, the abductor, ruling that the girl had willingly embraced Islam.
Five days after the ruling, the girl managed to flee from her husband’s house. She said she was held prisoner in a basement where her captor drugged and raped her before forcing her to convert and marry.
Many surveys have put the number of such girls to be over 1000 every year.
The Pakistan Human Rights Commission and the Centre for Social Justice indicated in their various reports the significant rise in the number of such incidents in the last few years–the first surge that happened during the Covid years and as the country spiraled down economically thereafter.
The year 2021 saw an increase of 80 percent and in 2020 over 50 percent from past reports.
The data showed that these episodes were accompanied by a range of other criminal offenses, including, but not limited to, assault, kidnapping, abduction, forced marriage, child marriage, statutory rape, rape, gang rape, forced prostitution, and use of force.
The fear of predation has been so overwhelming to these families that they have stopped sending their young girls to school.
Much of the problem lies with the state which refuses to introduce and implement laws that can protect young girls from such predatory attacks.
On October 12, 2021, during the Parliamentary Committee to Protect Minorities from Forced Conversion meeting, Chairperson Senator Liaqat Khan Tarakai dismissed the draft of The Prohibition of Forced Conversions Act 2021 (the Bill) without even giving it a hearing.
A month back, the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony raised several objections to this bill drafted by the Federal Ministry of Human Rights. Not that the lawmakers were so callous in the past.
The All India Muslim League adopted a Resolution in December 1927 at Calcutta which, among other restrictions, said, “that no individual or group shall attempt to do so or prevent it’s being done by force, fraud or other unfair means, such as the offering of material inducement.”
The Constitution of Pakistan offers protection to women in cases of forced conversion but the criminal justice system and its practices make it an impossible task for such women to seek and procure justice in Pakistan today.
Once converted, women are told their parents are kafirs or non-believers and hence they could not communicate with them.
The state has chosen to turn its face away in such cases.
Two bills, tabled in 2016 and 2019, were shot down. A similar law was killed in 2020.
The state of Pakistan has no interest in protecting the rights and lives of thousands of young women who fall prey to predator Muslim men with the support of police, judges, maulvis, and political leaders.