It’s less what the eye sees and more what the soul feels. Every year in Pakistan, several hundred underage Christian or Hindu girls are forcibly converted and married to their abductors. The cases of forced conversions and marriages have simultaneously exposed an unequal cruel world heading rapidly down to the depths of racial inequalities and intolerance which is making life increasingly brutal for religious minorities. Very often, the grave howls of families suffering such cruelty, simply for belonging to a “different faith”, fracture my sleep, with silent tears which hold the loudest pain.
Our insensitively flippant attitudes and flinched hearts have nourished the bitter tulips in Jinnah’s Pakistan to send minorities into a tailspin. Many therefore assert we belong to an infertile land where bitter tulips are no longer stranger to the world. Of course, everyone has the right to be treated equally, regardless of race, nationality, religion, or health. Sadly, religious identity is a brand factor that determines which citizens are more equal than others in terms of status, rights, and opportunities. This widely seen evidence painfully suggests some citizens are more equal than others in Jinnah’s Pakistan.
The present state of religious minorities and apparent shallowness of our system is a moment of truth to compare the grave situation in the light of a promise made by founding Father Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah on August 11, 1947. “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”
Our wilful blindness and institutional inadequacies to stand up with the victim families have engendered the ethical decline. This also hints at the calamitous handling of the governments to reinforce much-needed legislation, to quench the flames of such crimes. Perhaps, the government seems to believe that the best way to deal with the fault lines of forced conversion and marriage is to forget all about them and pigeonhole the issue. The pattern of every forced conversion and marriage is a similar but fascinating insight into the culture that appears to be seriously defective and deviant practices to disrupt the prevalence of justice.
Another part of the problem is many religious institutions and local mosques do not intend to investigate the nature of conversion and age of the girl. To convert someone is perceived as a pious deed that will bring rewards, no matter which method employed to execute the conversion. Some people with no experience of losing a daughter, argue such dark deeds must be performed to serve the religion. They rather miss the point of religion which is fundamentally based on three principles which are kindness, kindness, and kindness.
Suffering, with anxiety and grief many parents lose their hope in the grip of a poor justice system and economic crisis. Media and Police often turn a blind eye to reports of abduction, forced conversion or marriage, and set up impunity for perpetrators by refusing to record a First Information Report or falsifying the information. As a result, the victim girls are largely left in the custody of their kidnapper throughout the trial process, where they are subject to rape and forced to claim that the conversion was willing.
The UK Government has issued a strong condemnation of forced marriage and conversion of women and girls belonging to minorities in Pakistan. In Addition, All Parties Parliamentarian Group (APPG) on Pakistani Minorities has also launched a motion in support of underage victims.
Lord Alton of Liverpool, a former Liverpool MP and current member of the House of Lords have raised the issue of forced conversions and marriages in questions and speeches on nearly a dozen occasions in the past few weeks, and, over the years, around forty times. In recent months, he also wrote letters to the authorities in Pakistan and to the UK. He also had a long conversation with the parents of one of the abducted girls. It is heart-breaking for any father to listen to another father to describe what has happened to his daughter. Those of us with a platform and a voice have a duty to go on raising our voices on behalf of those who are unheard and whose families have been robbed of their loved ones.
In most events of forced conversion, both parents and daughter end up as losers. Of course, the experience is traumatic as some parents will never speak up for their daughters because of their inability to protect their daughters. They are left alone in the limbo of mental health problems and social neglect, sometimes from their own community. These “forever wars” result in less willingness to wage an ugly and seemingly unwinnable legal war for the return of their daughters. Pakistan may expect to face a mutiny of parents if it did not repudiate the dark shades of forced conversions and marriages.
We have slaughtered kindness, which is a golden thread of humanity. As a result, we have lost decisively the central narrative of equality and freedom by trapping underage innocent girls forcefully. Yet, there is a ray of hope, trying to break through and illuminate this dark world. Shocked by violence and crimes against minorities, the Supreme Court of Pakistan took up the issue of persecution of religious minorities in 2014. The then Chief Justice of Pakistan, Tassaduq Jillani authored an extraordinary judgment which projected that ‘justice is blind’ does not mean that judges are unable to see unfairness. He ordered the state to take affirmative steps to create a level-playing field for minorities, but six years after that historical judgment, minorities’ situation seems to be getting worse. A lie does not become truth, wrong does not become right, evil does not become good, as everything will embrace truth one day.
Qamar Rafiq is based in the UK, has an MBA from Pakistan, studied leadership in 21st Century from Copenhagen Business School and has specialization in Health informatics from Johns Hopkins University.
