IMAGINE a place so desolate that cries for help go unheard by millions around it. Imagine a place where inhabitants must bear their burdens of want with little hope of reprieve. Imagine a place where children — specifically little girls — cannot escape the rabid decrees of rabid clerics. In Pakistan, there is no need to imagine such a place.

District Tharparkar in Sindh has in recent years and months seen just about every calamity that can be imagined. There have been famine and malnutrition that have claimed lives. There have been pestilence and the outbreak of measles taking the lives of newborn babies. To this ignominious list, we must now also add several cases of forced religious conversion and the marriage of children.

Last Friday, two videos began to circulate on Pakistan’s social media. They depicted a sordid scene. Two young girls, who have since been identified as Reena and Raveena, aged 14 and 16, are seen sitting next to two men. A bearded cleric sits next to the row of the terrified-looking foursome. The video shows the man performing a marriage ceremony in which the two girls, newly converted to Islam, agree to be married to the two men.

Not only are the girls underage, too young to be legally married under the Child Marriage Restraint Act, they have also been reportedly coerced into changing their religion. According to accounts by their family, both were abducted from their homes and then married to sate the zealotry of local religious extremists.

If someone had not put it up on social media, the case would have dropped from the radar, and there would have been no outcry.

If someone had not taken a video of the whole thing and put it up on social media, the case would have passed without any outcry at all from any quarter. The girls’ father’s attempts at self-immolation outside the police station, which initially refused to even file an FIR, would have been rejected as yet another desperate act by a Hindu man in a desolate district.

It was the videos that forced people to pay attention. Those deemed guilty defended themselves on the video as well. In the footage, the girls said that they had voluntarily accepted Islam and agreed to their marriage. However, the young girls were not presented in court, where a judge could have asked them the same questions, ensuring that they were not being threatened in some way or were not under duress when they spoke.

Then, if all this were not enough, the matter of the hapless girls was made part of the cross-border tensions that currently afflict the region. Indian leaders began to point to the girls’ plight as an example of ‘Islamic extremism’ in the country and the poor condition of religious minorities in Pakistan. Soon, the matter had devolved into a perverse competition of which country, Pakistan or India, had the worst record when it came to respecting the rights of religious minorities. It seemed no longer to be a matter of the two girls or their terror-stricken families.

With the police having detained a number of people suspected of involvement, a thorough probe is now necessary in the case of the two sisters. There is a reason that conversion under compulsion is frowned upon in Islam. The reason is simply that faith and belief are not something that can be forced by one human on another.

As was the case in the mediaeval ages, Muslims, or Christians and Jews were forced to convert to one or another religion based on who was the conqueror and who the conquered. Unsurprisingly, in accounts from those ages, people did not convert with any sincerity, simply doing what had to be done in order to survive. Many looked upon it as a permissible act, because the outward motions of accepting this or that faith did not equal actually embracing and believing its tenets.

Forced conversions are not a new problem in Tharparker, even though the region has in the past lived in harmony. As investigative journalist Naziha Syed Ali reported in this paper in 2017, the extreme poverty of the area, the scheduled castes that live there, the constant possibility of persecution, all make it easy to force those who are so powerless.

In that report, Ms Ali discovered that there were 25 conversions taking place every month in the town of Umerkot. The grotesque logic of it all was simply that the more people converted, the ‘easier’ became the road to paradise of those who had facilitated the conversion. At the time the report was published, two other girls had been married in similar circumstances. Now, of course, a similar tragedy has befallen another family.

Laws are important in defeating such a scourge but more crucial is public debate and discussion on the idea of religious belief as a matter of choice, as something rooted deep within a person’s psyche. The reduction of faith to something that can be forced on another individual at gunpoint or by threatening harm to their family is an act of cruelty and torture.

As mentioned, in the recent case, arrests have been made. According to news reports, seven people including, the cleric who performed the wrongful marriage ceremony, have been arrested. One hopes that the two girls will be produced in court before a judge very soon.

One also hopes that the men who have been arrested are actually tried and punished instead of the usual eventuality, where the culprits are caught and then released when media attention on the case has abated. More than ever, one hopes that Pakistanis, particularly educated ones, start denouncing forced conversions. Forcing the weak, the helpless, the voiceless to accept a religion does nothing but malign the faith itself, divorcing it from its message of justice and truth.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, March 27th, 2019