KARACHI: Incidents of forced marriage and conversion can be effectively addressed if the government implements the already existing women-related laws including the Sindh Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2013 that prohibits marriage of children below 18 years, said speakers at a meeting held on Friday to prepare a draft on forced conversion and marriage — an issue particularly affecting the Hindu community.

Legal experts and representatives of civil society and political parties participated in the discussion organised by the South Asia Partnership-Pakistan (SAP) at a local hotel.

There was a consensus among the speakers that a non-Muslim individual had to face discriminatory attitudes since childhood in Pakistan and one of the reasons for it was that school textbooks instilled a feeling of prejudice in children against members of other religious communities.

They called upon the government to address this problem by making changes in textbooks and introducing information about other religions.

While some speakers were focused on the religious aspect of the issue of forced conversion and marriage and questioned as to why boys and mature women were not being converted to Islam, others said that the matter must not be seen in terms of religion as, in most cases, it had to do with emotions.

It came as a shock and surprise for many in the audience when it was pointed out that some much hyped cases of forced conversion and marriage were more a case of love marriage rather than forced marriage.

“We should know how Lata and Asha reached the court. We don’t look after our children well when they are in our custody but when they do something wrong, it is said that it is a case of forced conversion and marriage,” said advocate Kalpana Devi.

Marriages based on flimsy grounds like infatuation, in her opinion, were not just troubling the Hindu community, but had also become a big issue in Muslim families today. “These young girls have no idea of love that only means freedom to them. But, there is a difference between freedom and losing moral values,” she said.

According to Ms Devi, there had been a significant increase in cases of divorce and marriage dissolution which, she said, was often found to be linked to girls’ material desires that husbands failed to meet.

“That doesn’t mean forced conversion and marriage doesn’t exist. It’s a reality but mainly affects those who are poor and marginalised. Likewise, discrimination affects everyone who has no voice,” she said.

She asked privileged members of religious minorities to build shelter homes for girls. “I have been making this request for a long time. Who will accept the girls who run away from homes or are kidnapped?” she argued.

The participants called for making amendments to old women-related laws, some of them are a century old, and implementation of those that had been passed in recent years.

Continued discrimination, forced conversion and marriage, harassment, kidnappings and extortion, they said, had forced a number of Hindu families to migrate and the process continued.

Those who were migrating were doing so under duress and were not happy even in India, where they were looked down upon as ‘Pakistanis’, they said.

“We don’t want to leave this country. This is our birthplace,” said Amarnath Motumal of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. In a very emotional speech, he narrated a number of cases of forced conversion and marriage in which, he told the audience, every member of the court showed bias and degrading behaviour and the decision was given against the aggrieved party.

“I suggest people must not take these cases to courts because then the offence gets a legal cover and nobody can challenge it,” he said, adding that judges usually never let the ‘kidnapped’ girl go to a shelter home or meet her parents and take a decision with a free mind.

Zulfiqar Shah of the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research recommended setting up a high-powered commission comprising members of all faiths to investigate and decide cases of forced conversion and marriage.

Comrade Rochi Ram regretted that individuals representing the Hindu community in assemblies didn’t raise their voice on discrimination and other issues affecting the people at large. “No one raises the issue of returning the land in Tharparkar district that belonged to the Hindus who left it during the 1971 political turmoil,” he said.

President of All Pakistan Hindu Panchayat Ravi Dawani, PPP MPA Lal Chand, MPA of PML-F Nand Kumar, Zulfiqar Halepoto and Shahnaz Shehdi of South Asia Partnership-Pakistan also spoke.

Published in Dawn, August 30th , 2014