‘Forced conversion reports without empirical evidence’

Islamabad:The reports of forced conversion of the members of religious minorities in Pakistan are baseless and lack empirical evidence, claims a study.

The baseline study conducted by Quaid-i-Azam University PhD scholar (anthropology) and Institute of Policy Studies research fellow Ghulam Hussain urged the civil society organisations and others not to raise ‘false alarm’ on sensitive issues and recommended a primary research on faith conversions and factors behind it.

“To say that in Pakistan, non-Muslims are forced by religious clerics and the State will be a sweepingly naïve understanding of the very complex phenomena, and will be as flawed as the assertion that free-will conversions are always divinely-inspired,” it said.

The study report comes at a time when a parliamentary committee is looking into the alleged forced religious conversions, especially in parts of Sindh province. According to it, various civil society organisations allege the forced conversion of female members of religious minorities to Islam in Pakistan and that allegation has resonated at various forums, including Indian Parliament, and in the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom reports.

Some reports insist that as many as 1,000 Hindu and Christian girls are kidnapped, forcibly converted and married off annually in the country.

The researcher claimed that he had critically analysed some three dozen reports of various human rights organisations alleging that there is an organised and systematic effort of forcibly converting non-Muslims to Islam in the country, but found them to be without primary or empirical data.

"Such reports rely on clichés cited from another report that too is prepared without evidence. At most, some of these reports base themselves on anecdotal evidence taken from newspaper reports and political statements and none of these reports verifies the allegations of forced conversions from ‘the supposed victims and so-called perpetrators. Claims in these reports are tautological in nature and make circular arguments on the basis of unverified/unverifiable secondary sources," he said in the study report.

The study also interrogated the polemics against clerics, lawyers, police and the state that characterises the content of the reports, and showed how the narrative was developed into a charged rhetoric through social media platforms to malign the state and society of Pakistan and the religion of Islam.

"Social media accounts associated with Hindu extremist groups in India are the most active in spreading such allegations." The study also underscored the narrative internal to minority communities, particularly the Scheduled Castes or Dalits, and suggested that the caste-based divisions, endogamy, and patriarchy were among the socio-economic push and pull factors that caused faith conversion, apart from a natural and genuine urge for a more satisfying way of life as religion.

"In fact, the faith conversions have been taking place at individual and collective levels through all times in the region of Sindh and Southern Punjab, where forced conversions are mostly alleged.

“To say that in Pakistan, non-Muslims are forced by clerics and the state will be a sweepingly naïve understanding of the very complex phenomena, and will be as flawed as the assertion that free-will conversions are always divinely inspired."

The study asked the civil society organisations and individuals not to raise 'false alarm on sensitive issues through a rhetoric that tarnishes the image of Pakistan and Muslims without any clear justification and undermines genuine issues of the oppressed scheduled castes'. Given the lack of evidence of ‘forced conversion’, it recommended against an anti-conversion law seeing it 'potentially immature and flawed without a real picture being explored'.