Inter-faith dialogue can be a tricky business in Pakistan. Take the case of Monica Jennifer, a 21-year-old Christian from Rawalpindi. On 17 November, she disappeared from her parents’ home. A few days later she told a court that she had married her next-door neighbour and had converted to Islam.
Her distraught family told the Pakistan Christian Post that the real story was that she had been abducted and forcibly converted.
A Protestant pastor, Imran Amanat, said that Christian girls are at risk in the Muslim-majority nation.
“They are not safe, even though the law prohibits underage marriages and court marriages without parental consent. Yet some extremists exploit Islamic Sharia to justify these actions.”
Local authorities deride such stories a “propaganda-driven”. Participants in a seminar organised by the Institute for Policy Studies in November in Islamabad concluded that “allegations of forced conversions to Islam have not been substantiated with credible evidence.”
However, an astonishing recent report from Pakistan’s own National Commission on the Rights of the Child, “Children from Minority Religions in Pakistan” supports Amanat’s pessimistic assessment.
About four per cent of Pakistanis belong to “minority religions”, mostly Christians and Hindus. In the words of the report, they battle with “systemic discrimination”, especially their children.
At school they face discrimination at school by classmates and teachers; the curriculum reinforces prejudices again their religion. Many drop out of school.
But “the most concerning issue” is forced conversions, the report says.
“Young girls, often minors, are abducted and coerced into converting to Islam, followed by forced marriages with much older men. This practice is especially prevalent in Sindh and southern Punjab where religious minorities are concentrated.
“Once abducted, the girls are subjected to pressure, threats, and sometimes violence, forcing them to renounce their faith.
“The legal system often fails to protect these girls due to weaker enforcement of laws and societal biases. The courts sometimes validate these conversions and marriages by accepting dubious claims that the girls converted willingly, even when there is clear evidence of coercion.”
The United Nations has often criticised the existence of forced conversions in Pakistan. However, the report laments that “Pakistan’s failure to implement previous recommendations has allowed these issues to persist and escalate.”
Instead of fading away, forced conversions are “escalating”, the report says. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimates that a thousand girls from Hindu and Christian communities are forcibly converted to Islam each year. “However, this figure is believed to be conservative, with actual numbers potentially much higher,” the report asserts.
The “Children from Minority Religions in Pakistan” report appears to be a step forward for Pakistan. Ignoring repeated reports of forced conversions and describing them as foreign meddling should be impossible now.
As Bitter Winter, a religious freedom news service, comments, “The discrimination of religious minority children in Pakistan is not a narrative – it is a tragic fact. And now, the state has said so.”