Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan has admitted that forced conversions of young non-Muslim girls are carried out in the country.
While addressing a minority convention, the cricketer-turned-politician on Thursday condemned the forced conversions of Hindu girls to Islam in Sindh, reports Dawn.
“There is an ayat (verse) in the Holy Quran [that] there is no coercion in Islam. This is Allah’s commandment. Whoever forcefully converts a non-Muslim is disobeying Allah,” he was quoted as saying.
This is the first time that any politician has commented on the issue of forceful conversions in Pakistan.
Though there have been several reports of forced conversions, especially of minority Hindu girls, the governments and politicians in Pakistan have remained silent on the practice so far and have done little to address the issue.
In October last year, a parliamentary committee disallowed an anti-forced conversion bill to be taken up at the Parliament after the Ministry of Religious Affairs opposed the proposed law despite protests by legislators belonging to minority communities.
On November 26 last year, a report by the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Pakistani Minorities, an informal, cross-party group formed by MPs and Members of the House of Lords, found that around 1,000 girls between the ages of 12-25 from minorities are forcibly converted to Islam in Pakistan every year and married to their abductors.
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They had described the situation as a “human-rights catastrophe”.
According to the 2017 census, Hindus make up around 2 per cent of Pakistan population, an overwhelming majority of them — close to 90 per cent — residing in Sindh province bordering Hindu-majority neighbour India.
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Last year, the United States had placed Pakistan on the list of “countries of particular concern” for religious freedom violations.
In 2016, Sindh province passed a law declaring forced conversion a punishable offence, but the region’s governor refused to ratify the legislation.
(With inputs from agencies)
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