by SABA IMTIAZ
Pakistani brides sit during a mass wedding ceremony in Karachi January 21, 2006
What reports of forced conversion in Pakistan say about the country on the 70th anniversary of its creation
While Pakistan was created as a Muslim state in 1947, the country’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, said that religious minorities should have the freedom to live there and practice their faith. But today Pakistan’s identity is that of an Islamic nationalist state, hardline religious groups are a formidable force, and religious minorities have little voice in society. As influential Islamic shrines and religious groups work to convert people to Islam, some Hindus are leaving their villages and moving to cities in Pakistan, or leaving Pakistan altogether and moving to India.
Cases of forced conversion are mostly reported from the Sindh province, as Meghwar’s was this year. Although Pakistan became a Muslim-majority state post-partition—with Muslims dominating politics, the economy, and society—Hindus managed to retain a degree of social influence in the Sindh province, where they were known as successful merchants. According to the most recent available census, more than 6 percent of Sindh’s population is Hindu.
But lower-caste and low-income Hindus in Sindh toil on farmlands for powerful, rich landowners, sometimes in a form of economic servitude. They face social discrimination and are often cut off from the Hindu community at large. A 2015 report by the South Asia Partnership-Pakistan argued that social, cultural, economic, and religious factors have combined with feudal power structures in rural areas to enable forcible conversions.
Lajpat Meghwadh, Ravita Meghwar’s brother-in-law, believes she was targeted because her family was part of a larger political dispute in their village over the use of a well. “The person who Ravita has gone off with has no connection to the family, except that they had a dispute. He has never come to our house,” he said.
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