Radhika Singh
In the “holy” Islamic month of Ramadan, a 14-year-old Christian girl, Myra Shebaz, was abducted by a group of Muslim men led by a man named Muhammad Naqash in Pakistan’s Faisalabad. The armed abductors fired a round of bullets in the air warning onlookers against any retaliation before forcing Myra into their car. The Movement for Solidarity and Peace, a human rights organization in the country, attests that about 1000 non-Muslim girls aged between 15 and 25 are converted and forcefully married off to Muslim men every year. Back in February, the Pakistani high court determined that the forced conversion and marriage of another 14-year-old Christian girl, Huma Younos, to an older Muslim man was legitimate and permissible. Myra, too, was married to her abductor. These cases have become so commonplace in Pakistan that they fail to shock us now. With girls, minors at that, being regularly terrorized by the hundreds, we wonder where the renowned Pakistani feminist, Malala, is, since otherwise she speaks volumes about the welfare and education of girls.
For years now, she has been brazenly cashing in on that one horrific incident that had befallen her. Several other classmates of hers suffered similar attacks, but didn’t win the benignity of assorted media houses in developed western nations. Malala Yousafzai, the 22-year-old manufactured activist of the liberal ecosystem, has time to visit developed Japan to preach to its civilized leaders about the education and well-being of women. but has no breath to spare on the continual violation of human rights, countless abductions, and forced religious conversion of teenage girls in her country, Pakistan. The very Pakistan that Ms. Yousafzai promises is a perfectly safe paradise, while she herself is living in exile, surrounded by the security and liberties offered in a foreign land.
The personification of selective virtue, as I have observed her to be, she didn’t waste a minute before jumping on the bandwagon of fake propaganda after the abrogation of Article 370 by the Indian government back in August 2019. To advance Pakistan’s interest, she peddled fake narratives with all her might on Twitter.
In the past several years, the constant conflict in Balochistan has been the subject of some of the major media coverage; incidents of violence on Balochistanis by the Pakistani army have are frequent. These are all corroborated reports, unlike the claims of brutality against Kashmiris made by keyboard warriors who shy away when interrogated legally. But Malala, the young face of the leftist propaganda machinery, posturing for peace in Kashmir, never addresses the insurgency in her own country and its state-sponsored hostilities on Balochistanis.
“The people of Kashmir have lived in conflict since I was a child, since my mother and father were children, since my grandparents were young. For seven decades the children of Kashmir have grown up amidst violence,” she tweeted. She, however, appears to have zero concern for the persecuted minorities of her country, despite the fact that they have been living under an interminable threat since the inception of Pakistan.
An Indian Twitter user sought her help in saving two Hindu teenagers who had been abducted and forcefully converted to Islam on Holi in 2019. Yet this demi-goddess of courage who doesn’t tire of waxing eloquent about women-empowerment could sum up no better response to a call for help than to block the Twitter user immediately.
Sikhs on both sides of the border held protests and demonstrations over the abduction and forced conversion of Jagjit Kaur in Pakistan last year. This heinous incident was followed up by yet another abduction and religious conversion of a Hindu girl by a member of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Pakistan’s ruling party. Sindh has been infamous since antiquity for its stories of stolen brides. Yet not a word of condemnation or concern flashed out of Malala’s blue-ticked Twitter account against these evil practices that are rampant in her country. This is a Nobel laureate who has been decorated for her struggle against the oppression of children.
Malala once penned an open letter to the 219 Nigerian schoolgirls seized by Boko Haram militants from their boarding school. Why? Did these young girls in terrorists’ captivity have access to her virtual verbosity? It was all about publicity for Malala, if you ask me.
With her proclivity for publishing open letters, why not address one to the government and people of her own country and make an appeal to end this decades-old monstrosity of targeting vulnerable girls of hapless families from the religious minorities in Pakistan – the peaceful and welcoming homeland she keeps selling to her fans in the west? She lends her voice to selective issues that would ingratiate her to the people of Pakistan, and help her pave a smooth way right into the center of Pakistani politics. Such a shame that the United Nations gave her a pedestal to push her fabricated narrative even further!
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