Proposed legislation on forced conversion opposed

Islamabad : The proposed legislation on forced conversions tabled before the parliamentary committee on minorities goes against the basic tenets of the Constitution, flouts the legislative authority of Parliament, and serves foreign interests.

This was the crux of the discussion held at a seminar on ‘rhetoric and reality of forced conversions in Pakistan’, which was organised by the Islamabad Bar Association and Legal Thinkers Forum in collaboration with Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) inside Islamabad ‘kutchery’ here.

Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan of the Jamaat-i-Islami accused the government authorities of 'enacting laws undermining or belittling statutes on blasphemy and death penalty, and creating hurdles in the way of religious conversions to appease international donors'.

He said under the proposed bill, newly converts to Islam would have to follow a very lengthy and cumbersome process to prove that their decision of conversion was devoid of any coercion or blackmailing.

He objected to the condition set in the bill suggesting a convert will have to earn a certificate from a session judge after a 3-months rigorous process of confirmation before he or she would be officially considered a Muslim.

"The bill is in contravention with the injunctions of Islam and the spirit of the 1973 constitution which was made in the light of Allama Iqbal’s Allahabad address given in 1930 and Quaid-e-Azam’s speeches delivered before and after the creation of Pakistan."

Sufi Ghulam Hussain, research officer at IPS, presented key findings of his research on the issue of forced conversions and briefed participants about the present on-going debate vis-à-vis the proposed anti-forced conversion bill. Denying the reported 1,000 forced conversions of Hindu girls each year in Pakistan, he insisted human rights organizations fabricated data and cited each other as an 'authentic source to give credence to their botched claims'.

"No empirical evidence in justification of this claim is found in the reports presented by human rights organizations including the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan," he added.

He said marriage was the prime reason behind such conversions as Islam did not allow Muslims to tie the knot outside their religion, so faith conversion became a ritualistic need for a convert.