Unequal standards

Much to the dismay of a significant numbers of senators and the Senate’s Functional Committee on Human Rights, the government has refused to implement a law which would make the forced conversion of Hindu women illegal and also put in place a Hindu marriage act – allowing the community to register its marriages just as Muslims do. At present, there is no such law. On Wednesday the Senate was told by a senior joint secretary of the Ministry of Religious Affairs that the ministry and the Council of Islamic Ideology had decided not to put in place the law despite the persistent demands of the Hindu community. The committee chairperson Nasreen Jalil expressed dismay at the decision, as did other senators who demanded this double standard be ended immediately. The Senate heard figures from the Aurat Foundation, compiled a few months ago, which stated that over 1,000 Hindu women are forcibly converted to Islam each year. MNA Ramesh Kumar said the absence of a law on marriage registration made it impossible to prove if the ‘converted’ woman had been married earlier, something that would obviously make her second marriage illegal. It is reported that in many cases minor girls are forced to change their religion after being married off, often to much older men.
If here today Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah would surely have been appalled at what the country has ended up as for minority communities. He had called on more than one occasion for equal rights for all citizens, regardless of religion. Aitzaz Ahsan also brought up this point by suggesting that people be labelled ‘Pakistanis’ rather than as minorities or Muslims. Clearly, there is a terrible double standard here. The decision arrived at by the government and the CII is shocking. Pakistan, like other countries around the world, has been bitterly critical of the treatment of minorities in neighbouring India. Yet its own record is no better. MNA Rumesh Kumar pointed out that things were worse in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh and that while KP and Balochistan’s provincial assemblies had accepted laws to prevent forced conversions, Sindh and Punjab had not responded. This whole problem falls in with our broader issue of intolerance and the notion that Muslim citizens of the country are somehow superior to everyone else. In many ways, this is a mirror image of what is happening in India. Somewhere, the mirror needs to be turned around to show a different picture and to protect Hindus, thousands of whom have migrated from the country as they are more and more socially ostracised. A more equal status has to be granted, not as charity but as a right given by the constitution.