Forced conversions hike minorities’ fears

Banditry is an old scourge in this impoverished district of southern Pakistan, on the plains between the mighty river Indus and a sprawling desert, where roving gangs rob and kidnap with abandon. Lately, though, local passions have stirred with allegations of an unusual theft: that of a young woman’s heart.
In the predawn darkness on February 24, Rinkle Kumari, a 19-year-old student from a Hindu family, disappeared from her home in Mirpur Mathelo, a small village off a busy highway in Sindh. Hours later, she resurfaced 12 miles away, at the home of a prominent Muslim cleric who phoned her parents with news that distressed them: Their daughter wished to convert to Islam, he said.
Their protests were futile. By sunset, Kumari had become a Muslim, married a young Muslim man, and changed her name to Faryal Bibi.
Over the past month, this conversion has generated an acrid controversy that has reverberated far beyond its origins in small-town Pakistan, whipping up a news media frenzy that has traced ugly sectarian divisions and renewed a wider debate about the protection of vulnerable minorities in a country that has so often failed them.
At its heart, though, it is a head-on clash of narratives and motives.
Hindu leaders insist that Kumari was abducted at gunpoint and forced to abandon her religion. Local Muslim leaders say she wanted to marry her secret sweetheart: Naveed Shah, a young neighbour who said he had been conducting a secret courtship with her via mobile phone and the Internet for several months. Kumari, for her part, has said in a court filing and media interviews that she converted of her free will – but public figures have questioned whether she had been pressed or intimidated into saying that.
For the past two weeks she has been sequestered in a women’s shelter in Karachi on court orders. Many Pakistanis hope she can resolve the central mystery: where do her religious, and romantic, intentions lie?
In one sense, the drama is an old story in South Asia, where the contours of society have been shaped by waves of conversions over the centuries. Since the founding of Pakistan, most conversions are to Islam, the state religion. But such conversions usually take place quietly, even in an organised fashion, and the unusual furore surrounding the latest case stems partly from the brash manner of her conversion at the hands of a divisive local politician, Mian Mitho.
After Kumari declared herself a Muslim in her town court on February 27, Mitho triumphantly led the new convert from the courthouse, parading her before thousands of cheering supporters. Then he drove her in a caravan to an ancient Sufi religious shrine controlled by his family and famed as a site where Hindus have been converted.
There, Kumari was welcomed by Mitho’s elderly brother, Mian Shaman – the same cleric who had converted her three days earlier – who led her into the towering shrine. When she emerged, now wearing a black veil, gunmen unleashed volleys of celebratory Kalashnikov fire into the air and shouted “God is calling you!”
Hindu leaders, enraged, viewed the images as a crass provocation. “If the couple was really in love, then why this fanfare of guns?” said Amarnath Motumal, a Hindu lawyer and human rights activist in Karachi. “It clearly shows they are trying to embarrass the Hindu community and are bent on taking our girls forcefully.”
Kumari’s parents pursued the case through the courts, claiming that their daughter had been abducted by a Muslim supremacist, and that the police and judiciary were biased against them because they came from a minority background.
“Mian Mitho is a terrorist and a thug. He takes the girls, and keeps them in his home for sexual purposes,” said Kumari’s father, Nand Lal, a government schoolteacher, noting that Mitho’s armed guards had escorted his daughter to court appearances and news conferences. His wife, Sulachany Devi, issued an anguished appeal. “Rinkle was my blood, and she remains my blood. All I want is for her to return home,” she said.
Mitho, in an interview, denied the allegations against him. “I am merely protecting her human rights,” he said. And at the Sufi shrine in Ghotki district, his brother, the cleric who converted Kumari, was equally unapologetic.
“We are saving them from the fires of hell,” said Mian Shaman, a frail man in his 70s with a mottled complexion and a wavering voice. “We consider they are born again, and the sins of their previous life are washed away.”
Shaman estimated he had converted 200 people the previous year. He insisted none had been coerced. “Forced conversions are not permitted in Islam,” he said firmly.
Shaman led the way into the mosque, a spectacular building covered in intricately patterned indigo tiles and a carved wooden roof. Then he walked into the adjacent shrine, where murmuring pilgrims rocked back and forth in front of four tombs containing the bones of the cleric’s ancestors.
Women are not permitted inside, he said – they may only peek through a small barred window in the tomb wall – but he made an exception for Kumari. “She was a special lady,” he said.
The case has caused division within the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, of which Mitho is a member. Earlier this month, President Asif Ali Zardari privately intervened to have Kumari taken into protective custody. Later, the president’s sister, Dr Azra Fazal Pechuho, delivered an impassioned speech to the parliament about the plight of the Hindu community.
“I have a lot of discomfort with this kind of behaviour,” said a senior party member from Sindh, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the matter. “The state is not giving the Hindus an equal environment. So they are turning to a narrative of forced conversion to fight back.”
Pir Muhammad Shah, the local police chief, agreed that Mitho’s actions had aggravated the situation. “It teased the whole Hindu community, and led them to believe the conversion had been done at gunpoint.”
Although Pakistan is blighted by sectarian bloodshed, rural Sindh is a relative beacon of religious tolerance. The majority of the country’s Hindus, estimated to number more than three million, live here, and they have a history of tranquil coexistence with Muslims. The two communities share religious festivals, go into business together, and attend one another’s weddings and funerals.
Yet it remains a delicate social balance. In many Sindhi towns, wealthy Hindu traders have been targeted by kidnappers. Conversions, which are freighted with notions of collective honour, can present a jarring social fault line. Officials with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan have spoken of up to 20 forced conversions a month – and Hindu families fleeing for India – but they admit that the research is thin.
As Kumari’s anticipated court date nears, it has revived many old tensions. And while no one is expecting widespread violence in her case, in some of its particulars it bears a remarkable resemblance to an earlier conversion scandal – one in 1936, when a British magistrate returned a Hindu girl to her parents after she had been converted. The result was an 11-year uprising by Muslim Pashtun tribesmen that at one point involved 40,000 British troops.
AP ADDS: It was barely 4:00 am when 19-year-old Rinkle Kumari disappeared from her home in a small village in Sindh. When her parents awoke they found only her slippers and a scarf outside the door.
A few hours later, her father got a call telling him his daughter, a Hindu, had converted to Islam to marry a Muslim boy.
Only days later, Seema Bibi, a Christian woman in the province of Punjab, was kidnapped along with her four children after her husband couldn’t repay a loan to a large landlord. Within hours, her husband was told his wife had converted to Islam and wouldn’t be coming home. Seema Bibi escaped, fled the village and has gone underground with her husband and children.
Hindu and Christian representatives say forced conversions to Islam have become the latest weapon of Islamic extremists in what they call a growing campaign against Pakistan’s religious minorities, on top of assassinations and mob intimidation of houses of worship. The groups are increasingly wondering if they still have a place in Pakistan.
“It is a conspiracy that Hindus and Christians and other minorities should leave Pakistan,” says Amar Lal, the lawyer representing Kumari in the Supreme Court. “As a minority, we feel more and more insecure. It is getting worse day by day.”
In the last four months, Lal said, 51 Hindu girls have been forcibly converted to Islam in Sindh, where most of Pakistan’s minority Hindu population lives. After Kumari disappeared from her home on February 24, Azra Fazal Pechuho, a lawmaker and the sister of President Asif Ali Zardari, told the parliament that Hindus in southern Sindh were under attack by Islamic extremists.
Kumari’s family has gone to the Supreme Court to get their daughter back. But the case is hotly contested by the Muslim family, who say Kumari’s conversion was voluntary. They say the couple had known each other and exchanged Facebook messages and phone calls before she converted and they married.
Recently, the Supreme Court ordered Kumari to be kept in a women’s shelter in southern Karachi until it resumes hearing the case on April 18.
“Christian and Hindu girls are targeted more and more,” says Father Emmanuel Yousaf, who heads the National Commission for Justice and Peace, an organisation born out of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference.
Yousaf, in the Punjabi capital of Lahore, said his group was helping Seema Bibi and a number of other Christians who had to leave their villages because of threats from extremists. Some of them were girls who were forcibly converted and others, he said, were falsely accused of acting against Islam for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) or abusing the Holy Quran.
There are dozens of cases of minorities being accused of insulting Islam under the country’s controversial blasphemy laws. Often the cases are rooted in disputes with Muslim neighbours or as coercion to convert, and judges often feel intimidated by extremists into convicting accused blasphemers, said Yousaf. “They know where you live and where your children go to school,” he said.
Roughly five percent of Pakistan’s 180 million people belong to minority religions, which include Hindu, Christian, Shia Muslims and Ahmadis, according to the CIA World Factbook. Ahmadis are reviled by mainstream Muslims as heretics. Over recent years, violence against the minorities has increased, as Islamic hardliners’ influence over the country has strengthened.
In May 2010, gunmen rampaged through an Ahmadi place of worship in Lahore, killing 93. In February this year, gunmen stopped four buses in northern Pakistan, picked out those with Shia-sounding names and shot them to death, killing 18. Last year, a provincial governor who criticised the blasphemy laws was killed by his own bodyguard, and the government’s only Christian cabinet minister – also an opponent of the laws – was gunned down by militants.
“In Pakistan, one’s religious faith, or lack of one, has become sufficient to warrant execution and murder,” Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physicist and peace activist wrote in a column earlier this month. “The killers do their job fearlessly and frequently.”
The violence has cowed Pakistan’s liberals and frightens even many Muslims.
“Extremism is a problem that is not just targeting the minorities. It is now a general problem in our society,” said Ijaz Haider, whose Jinnah Institute’s website carries an Extremism Watch documenting cases of attacks and intimidation by militants. “The liberal mindset has had a severe setback and the government has no strategy. It tries to do damage control, and damage control is to placate these groups.”
Critics say the government is too afraid and weak to respond or in some cases is even complicit as it panders to extremist groups for votes.
A report released last week by Yousaf’s justice and peace commission laid out a series of grim statistics about minority women in Pakistan. The study surveyed 1,000 women, three-quarters of whom said they had been sexually harassed at the workplace, discriminated against in schools or pressed by teachers to convert to Islam.
Yet they rarely complained. “They sense security in being silent as disclosing it might bring shame on themselves and their family,” the report said.
Mohyuddin Ahmad, the information secretary for the Punjab government, says politicians and police are afraid. “If you are killed by a terrorist, no one will come for condolences,” he said. Even incremental steps have to be taken slowly and silently so as not to ignite a firestorm by extremists, said Ahmad.
The provincial government has quietly sought to increase women’s participation in the work force, he said. It requires that a third of the members on government corporations and boards be women; all government offices must have day-care centres; 15 percent of all government jobs have to go to women; free land given to the poor is shared 50/50 by husband and wife; and acid throwing on a woman is now a terrorist act.
But incessant bickering among political parties, the judiciary, federal government and army have worked in extremists’ favour, Ahmad said.
“The provincial governments and the federal government know they are the scum of the earth, but we don’t agree on strategy,” said Ahmad. “We have no unity of command.”