WUNRN
PAKISTAN - ACCUSED KIDNAPPING OF
HINDU TEEN GIRLS FORCED TO CONVERT TO BE MUSLIM WIVES
The girls are forced to
convert to Islam, rights groups say. In court, a few wives have chosen to stay
with their husbands, but families say they were coerced.
Maharajni
Andhrabai holds a photo of Rachna Kumari, her 16-year-old granddaughter, in
Jacobabad, Pakistan. I asked her, Why did you leave us? the grandmother
recalled. She said, I was forced to. She was weeping. (Alex
Rodriguez / Los Angeles Times / March 30, 2012)
JACOBABAD, Pakistan Rachna Kumari, 16, was shopping
for dresses in this city's dust-choked bazaar when it happened.
The man who her family says abducted her was not a street thug. He was a police
officer.
Nor was he a stranger. Rachna's family knew and trusted him. He guarded the
Hindu temple run by her father, an important duty in a society where Hindus are
often terrorized by Muslim extremists, and he had helped Rachna cram for her
ninth-grade final exams.
After she disappeared from the market, he did not demand a ransom. According to
her family, he had an entirely different purpose: to force her to convert to
Islam and marry him.
In a country where Hindu-dominated
These days, however, Hindus are fixated on a surge of kidnappings of teenage
girls by young Muslim men who force them to convert and wed.
Pakistani human
rights activists report as many as 25 cases a month.
Most occur in the northern districts of Sindh province, on the border with
Hindus say the forcible conversions follow the same script: The victim,
abducted by a young man related to or working for a feudal boss, is taken to a
mosque where clerics, along with the prospective groom's family, threaten to
harm her and her relatives if she resists.
Almost always, the girl complies, and not long afterward, she is brought to a
local court, where a judge, usually a Muslim, rubber-stamps the conversion and
marriage, according to Hindu community members who have attended such hearings.
Often the young Muslim man is accompanied by backers armed with rifles. Few
members of the girl's family are allowed to appear, and the victim, seeing no
way out, signs papers affirming her conversion and marriage.
"In court, usually it's just four or five members of the girl's family
against hundreds of armed people for the boy," says B.H. Khurana, a doctor
in Jacobabad and a Hindu community leader. "In such a situation when we
are unarmed and outnumbered, how can we fight our case in court?"
Prominent Pakistani Muslims have joined Hindu leaders in calling attention to
the problem.
President Asif Ali Zardari's sister, lawmaker Azra
Fazal Pechuho, told parliament last month that a growing number of Hindu girls
are being abducted and held at madrasas, or Islamic religious schools,
where they are forcibly converted. She and other lawmakers have called for
legislation to prohibit the practice.
The issue was thrust into the spotlight by the case of Rinkle Kumari, a
17-year-old Hindu girl from the town of
Kumari's parents, who are not related to Rachna's family, allege that five men
broke into their house in late February, subdued Rinkle with a
chloroform-soaked cloth and took her away. The parents say the girl was forced
to convert to Islam and marry Naveed Shah, a neighbor.
Shah contends Rinkle acted willingly.
"She was not forced at all," said Shah's lawyer, Malik Qamar Afzal.
"She embraced Islam freely, and afterward agreed to marry."
The day after the alleged abduction and conversion, Rinkle was allowed to meet
with her mother at a district court.
"She told me, 'I have been kidnapped and I want to go with you,'"
recalled her mother, Sulchani Kumari. "She was sobbing as she told me,
'For God's sake, take me away from that hell.'"
Hindu community leaders acknowledge that in some cases, Hindu girls convert and
marry Muslim men willingly. Determining which cases involve coercion has been
difficult for authorities.
Asha Kumari, a 16-year-old Hindu girl not
related to Rinkle or Rachna, disappeared March 3 from a beauty parlor in
Jacobabad where she was taking a beautician's course, according to her brother,
Vinod Kumar, 22.
Neither her family nor police could find her until April 13, when she appeared
before the Supreme Court, accompanied by her new husband, Bashir Lashari.
Like Rinkle, she told the court she had willingly married and embraced Islam.
As in Rinkle's case, the conversion took place at a Sufi Muslim shrine run by
the brother of Mian Abdul Haq, a Muslim lawmaker with the ruling Pakistan
People's Party and a wealthy landowner in northern Sindh.
"This is the way it always happens," said Vinod Kumar. "These
girls are kidnapped, and then later they show up in court and say they have
converted."
Hindu community leaders took the cases of Rinkle and Asha and that of a third
Hindu woman all the way to the Supreme Court.
On Wednesday, the court ruled that the three could choose whether to stay with
their new husbands or return to their parents. All three decided to stay.
At the heart of the problem, Hindu community leaders say, is a lack of will on
the part of police and courts.
"When someone gets kidnapped, Hindus lodge kidnapping charges, but
authorities don't respond," said Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, a leader of the
Pakistan Hindu Council. "After 20 days, the kidnapper and his people
pressure the girl and say, 'If you don't accept Islam and give wrong answers in
court, you know what will happen.' That's coercion."
In the case of Rachna Kumari, police themselves stand accused.
Pakistani authorities have periodically assigned police officers to Hindu
temples as a precaution since the 1992 demolition of a mosque in
Barkat Talani, an officer at the Jacobabad temple run by Rachna's father, began
helping her with her studies as a favor to the family.
After she was abducted in August, Talani was arrested and suspended from his
job.
At a court hearing a month later, Rachna appeared in a black burka, surrounded
by about 100 of Talani's supporters, many of them armed, said the girl's uncle,
Rakesh Kumar. The judge accepted a statement written by Rachna that indicated
she had willingly converted and married. Her family contends the document was
drafted by Talani's lawyer.
A few weeks later, while out shopping with her new husband's female relatives,
Rachna appeared at her grandmother's door and asked for a drink of water.
"I asked her, 'Why did you leave us?'" the grandmother, Maharajni
Andhrabai, recalled. "She said, 'I was forced to.' She was weeping."
Later, Talani reported that Rachna had disappeared. Talani and her family both
say they do not know where she is.
Talani is back at work, according to Jacobabad's police chief, Jam Zafrullah
Dharejo, who said the allegations against the officer were unfounded.
Now the Kumari family has a singular focus: safeguarding Rachna's 13-year-old
sister, Bharti. They've withdrawn her from school and forbidden her to set foot
in the bazaar.
"We're so sad about what happened to Rachna," the grandmother said,
"but we're also worried about what else could happen."