The 60th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, held on September 19, heard a sobering intervention from human rights activist Arif Aajakia, who delivered an unflinching account of the persistent dangers faced by religious minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Speaking as the Executive Director of the Asian Human Rights Forum, Aajakia underscored the systematic failures of state authorities in both countries to provide meaningful protection, warning that the situation has not only endured but, in several instances, worsened.
His remarks spotlighted the entrenched structures of repression that define the lives of minorities in South Asia’s two Muslim-majority nations.
Aajakia’s intervention did not tread on rhetorical niceties. He laid bare the continuing horrors in Pakistan’s Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces, where, he alleged, prolonged military operations have left scars that run deep into communities.
The accounts of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and widespread torture paint a picture not of an isolated human rights lapse but of a system that normalises repression. “Thousands of Baloch and Pashtun peaceful citizens are missing, by the State forces,” he declared, drawing attention to the chilling discovery of mass graves and the tragic ritual where families reclaim the remains of loved ones without ever knowing what became of them in their final moments.
The most haunting image evoked in his testimony was not only of the dead but of the living—particularly the women and children who have taken to the streets in protest, demanding the return of missing family members. Far from being met with compassion, these demonstrations, Aajakia said, have been met with baton charges and arrests.
He invoked the example of Mahrang Baloch, who has become emblematic of the silenced voices—kept in incommunicado detention, cut off from the world, her fate left to the discretion of state authorities who operate with little transparency and less accountability.
The allegations strike at the heart of Pakistan’s legal framework. Aajakia drew attention to a recently introduced provisional order that allows security forces to detain individuals for up to 90 days without producing them in court. While the measure is justified by Islamabad as necessary for counterterrorism, it mirrors the very patterns of authoritarianism that human rights advocates have long decried.
Such provisions directly contravene international treaties to which Pakistan is a signatory, including those safeguarding individuals against arbitrary detention.
The normalisation of such laws not only entrenches impunity but also closes off the already narrow avenues for judicial recourse available to persecuted minorities and marginalised ethnic groups. For Pakistan’s religious minorities, these legal and extrajudicial measures add to a preexisting burden of structural discrimination.
Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, and Ahmadis continue to face entrenched social and institutional barriers.
Blasphemy laws, notoriously broad and often weaponised, hang like a sword over these communities, with mere accusations sufficient to incite mob violence.
Churches and temples remain vulnerable to attacks, often in the presence of indifferent law enforcement. Forced conversions, particularly of Hindu and Christian girls, are reported with grim regularity, yet convictions remain elusive, further entrenching a climate of fear and resignation.
If Pakistan exemplifies state complicity and structural repression, Bangladesh reflects a more insidious form of hostility—one that is less visible to international observers but equally corrosive. Aajakia’s remarks stressed that minorities in Bangladesh, including Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians, endure sustained pressures that manifest through political marginalisation, social exclusion, and sporadic violence.
The decline of minority populations in Bangladesh, once estimated to constitute a far larger share of the demography, reflects the silent exodus of communities pushed to the brink by insecurity and systematic neglect. Bangladesh’s trajectory on minority rights has been marked by contradictions.
On one hand, it positions itself as a secular democracy; on the other, its minorities remain vulnerable to intimidation and political erasure. The violent outbreaks against Hindus during communal unrest, the destruction of temples, and targeted attacks on minority-owned businesses highlight an enduring failure of state institutions to ensure equal protection under the law.
Authorities often adopt a posture of denial or minimisation, dismissing these as isolated incidents rather than acknowledging the structural vulnerabilities that enable such violence. At the UN forum, Aajakia’s insistence that both countries have consistently failed their minorities underscored the deep rot within their governance frameworks.
His call for a UN fact-finding mission to Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa carried a sense of urgency, reflecting not just the plight of those already victimised but also the looming threat of future abuses under the cloak of state-sanctioned impunity. Such missions, while often resisted by sovereign governments, carry the weight of international legitimacy that grassroots activists and families of the disappeared struggle to achieve on their own.
What emerges from his testimony is not merely a list of grievances but a pattern of systemic exclusion. In Pakistan, the state’s direct involvement in military operations and its legislation enabling arbitrary detention create a machinery of repression that disproportionately targets ethnic and religious minorities.
Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, state neglect enables majoritarian impulses to fester, leaving minorities vulnerable to episodic waves of violence and long-term marginalisation.
Both models reflect a profound failure to embrace pluralism as a core democratic value. The silence that often surrounds these abuses compounds their severity. International attention is fleeting, and the global community, preoccupied with geopolitical alliances and economic considerations, often allows such issues to languish at the margins of discourse.
For the women of Balochistan holding photographs of their missing sons, for the Hindu families in Bangladesh watching temples reduced to rubble, and for the countless others whose daily lives are shaped by fear, such silence translates into abandonment. The UNHRC intervention may fade from headlines, but the realities it captures remain unyielding.
Religious minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh exist in a perpetual state of vulnerability, where the promise of citizenship is hollow and the protections of law are illusory.
The stories of mass graves, forced conversions, arbitrary detentions, and targeted violence are not aberrations but elements of an enduring order—an order that defines who belongs and who remains at the mercy of power. Aajakia’s testimony, stark and uncompromising, serves as a reminder that beneath the statistics and policy debates are human lives irreversibly scarred by state complicity and societal prejudice.
The persistence of these challenges, decade after decade, underscores that what is at stake is not only the future of minority communities in South Asia but also the credibility of international human rights mechanisms tasked with defending them.