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A midnight police operation on July 23, Thursday to disperse a 27-day protest camp demanding the recovery of abducted children, including Priya Kumari, has ignited anger across Sindh in Pakistan. The brutal manner in which the police cracked down on the protest has led to several demonstrations in many cities and the legal fraternity announcing a province-wide court boycott.
The police arrested key organisers and removed protesters from the Babarlo National Highway sit-in after negotiations failed, triggering widespread condemnation from activists, journalists and political groups. The legal fraternity announced a boycott of the courts in the province on Friday, according to a report of The Express Tribune.
Priya Kumari was abducted on the day of Ashura in August 2021 while helping her family distribute water and refreshments to mourners outside their home in Sangharar village of Sukkur during Muharram processions. After she vanished, her family filed a First Information Report (FIR) at the local police station but after over five years, countless investigations and such actions, she has not been recovered till date by the police.
The head of Priya Kumari committee Sohni Paras, President of Sukkur National Press Club Sahil Jogi and Liaquat Jalbani, are among those detained. The police began to disperse the protesters amid thunderstorm at around 2am on Thursday after SSP Khairpur Amir Saud Magsi held a final round of unyielding negotiations.
Magsi ordered Sohni Paras to disembark from the mini truck from where she was making speeches and to sit with the officers to discuss the progress. Bravely confronting the senior police officer, she refused to yield, asserting that the police should show progress by recovering some of the kidnapped children. She reminded Magsi that they suspended the first round of their sit-in on July 17 on the police assurance of showing progress by recovering some of the children within three days.
She told the SSP that the committee already gave them one extra day before taking recourse to the sit-in on the highway at the location of Babarlo in Sukkur, the same place where Sindh’s legal fraternity had organised sit-in against construction of new canals in April, 2025.
She also recalled that the committee had given details regarding only five cases to the police on July 17. The photos of 17 children were displayed at the protest camp. The figure later increased to 27, according to the committee as one parent after another came up with details of their missing children. In the interim, the police recovered a minor 16-year-old Asif Mughal from Noshera in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and produced her in a Sukkur’s court, stating that she had married of her free will.
Half an hour after Magsi’s brief talks, during which he raised slogan of long live Pakistan, the police descended upon the protesters. “Azaadi ja nara lagayan waran te lanat huje [curse the people shouting slogans of independence],” the SSP shouted. The crowd responded with the same slogan of “Long live Pakistan’’, and asserted that their slogans of Azaadi (freedom) were aimed at getting their children freed from their abductors.
Meanwhile, journalists, lawyers, nationalist parties and other segments of society condemned the police action and demanded immediate release of the protesters. The Sindh Bar Council announced a province wide strike in the courts on July 24. The media workers, who complained that their co-workers were manhandled by the police who beat up the protesters. Their mobile phones and cameras were also snatched and they were warned of staging a sit-in protest outside DIG Sukkur’s office if Jogi was not released soon.
The story of Priya Kumari, abducted over four years ago, and other minor girls of Hindu and Christian faiths is actually a harrowing tale of abduction and forced conversions. There are grim statistics available in the public domain and it is institutional failures, mainly of the police as also judiciary at all levels, that has perpetuated this endless human rights crisis. It raises very important, rather critical questions about international funding and moral accountability.
In Pakistan, the abductions, forced conversions, and marriages of minor Hindu and Christian girls are happen with a monotonous regularity. This is happening again, and again, as the state institutions of Pakistan encourage the perpetrators and are complicit themselves. As such, minor girls of minority communities continue to be abducted, vanish, their identities are obliterated and their families have to suffere these indignities silently with the police and the judiciary failing them.
Minor girls from Hindu and Christian communities, as young as 12 years, are frequently abducted from their households, coerced into conversion, and married off to significantly older men. The average age difference between the minor girls abducted and older men to whom they are married off is over 20 years, according to sources.
Most victims of such horrendous crimes are under 16 years of age, and in over 70 per cent of documented instances, law enforcement either refused to file First Information Reports (FIRs) or subsequently weakened them deliberately. In numerous cases, victims were presented in court asserting they had “willingly converted,” a patently false narrative. Threats of harming the family members of the victims remain the most significant reason for their coercion.
Mohinder Gulati, President of the Global Hindu Temple Network America, highlighted the issue at the World Bank Civil Society Organisation (CSO) Forum and in discussions with the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) last year. His comments were based on a data based report titled ‘Pakistan: Gender-based Violence against Minor Girls of Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians’, published by the Global Hindu Temple Network.
The report provided verified statistics on hundreds of incidents involving the abduction and forced conversion of minor girls between 2021 and 2025. Mr Gulati questioned how Pakistan continues to secure billions in developmental aid while disregarding severe violations of fundamental rights of minor girls belonging to minority communities.
Hundreds of cases of abductions, rapes, forced conversions and subsequent marriages of minor girls of minority communities have been registered with the police but with zero results on the ground, he has pointed out. On December 26, 2025, a 15-year-old Hindu girl named Premi Bhil was abducted from the Sindh province, forcibly converted to Islam, and given the new name Kulsoom Sheikh. She was then married to a man more than twice her age, and who was already married.
Between January 2021 and December 2024, at least 421 cases of abduction and forced conversion of minority girls and women were documented in Pakistan, as per the ‘Human Rights Observer 2025’ released by the UK’s Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) in April 2025. Victims included 282 Hindu girls, 137 Christian girls and two Sikh girls.
Some months ago, in March this year, a minor Hindu girl Miran Meghwar was abducted from her home in Mirpurkhas by two men identified as Tariq Kauri and Allah Dino Kauri. The Meghwar family’s appeals for urgent action, urging law enforcement and civil society to intervene have remained unheeded so far. The identification of the abductors by the Meghwals has not helped them as the police and judiciary have both failed them.
