On July 22, 2023, the head of Pakistan’s Darawar Ittehad, named Shiva Kachhi said that three daughters of a Hindu businessman named Leela Ram were first abducted and then subsequently converted to Islam and then married off to Muslim men. The incident took place in Dharki, an area that comes under the Sindh province of Pakistan.
The Pakistan Darawar Ittehad is a Pakistani Hindu organisation leading protests against the abduction, coercive conversion and forceful marriage of Hindu women and girls against their wishes.
According to Shiva Kachhi, “The conversion was performed by one man named Pir Javed Ahmed Quadri, and later they were married to Muslim men.” Despite appeals and pleas from his organisation’s platform, the problem of forceful conversions of Hindu girls is still underway and the local authorities such as the police are not serious in apprehending the culprits.
Kachhi further said that the three daughters of Leela Ram were actually married to the same men who abducted the trio. The intensity of the attacks on the minority communities (Hindus) increased manifold after the Seema Haider incident.
A woman named Seema Haider who is from Pakistan and the mother of four children sneaked into India to live with an Indian named Sachin Meena, whom she befriended through an online game platform. She was ostracised by her family and community members for daring to defy the societal norms of a conservative Muslim country.
Kachhi claimed that there have been daily threats from the dacoits in the riverine areas to retaliate against the Hindus because of this incident. Last week a gang of dacoits attacked a Hindu temple with rocket launchers along with the adjoining houses belonging to Hindus in the Kashmore area of the Sindh province.
“After the temple of the Bhagris was attacked by the dacoits in Kashmore, the authorities have now sent Hindu Policemen for the security of the temples and worship places in Mirpurkhas, Kashmore, Tharparkar, Ghotki, Sukkur, Umerkot and Sanghar,” Kachhi alleged. The Hindu policemen had also been sent to riverine areas to hunt the dacoits.
“These are poor Hindu people who are serving in low positions in the police belonging to different areas of Sindh, and the authorities now want them to provide security for the Hindu worship places,” Kachhi added.
Hindus constitute the largest minority community in Pakistan, and they are settled in the Sindh province, where they share culture, traditions and language with Muslim residents.
The abduction and the forceful conversion of Hindu women and girls in the Sindh province of Pakistan have become a menace and a difficult problem for Hindus living in these areas.
In January 2023, a married Hindu girl was abducted from the town of Umerkot in Sindh. As the abductors threatened and tried to forcibly convert to Islam. When she refused, they raped her. In June 2022, a girl named Kareena Kumari told the court that she was abducted and forcefully converted to Islam.
In March 2022, three Hindu girls- Satran Oad, Kaveeta Bheel, and Anita Bheel were abducted from their homes, forcibly converted and then married to Muslim men in a period of just eight days. The same year in March, a girl named Pooja Kumari was shot dead outside her home in Sukkur.
Apparently, a Pakistani man wanted to marry her, but when she refused to do so, the man and two accomplices shot the girl a few days later.
Not only young teenage girls but older Hindu women fell prey to abduction and forceful conversions. Gori Kohli, a mother of four children, was abducted from Khipro in Sindh, and later, it transpired that she had converted to Islam and married to Aijaz Marri, the man accused of kidnapping her.
In the year 2020, the Associated Press reported that around 1000 girls are forcibly converted to Islam every year. It has been noted that most of the converted girls are impoverished Hindus from the Sindh province of Pakistan
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