Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has admitted that non-Muslims are forced to convert to Islam in the country. In a speech to a minority convention on Thursday, the cricketer-turned-politician condemned the forced conversions of Hindu girls to Islam in Sindh, according to Dawn.
‘According to an ayat (verse) in the Holy Quran, there is no coercion in Islam’. This is a commandment from Allah. ‘ Whoever converts a non-Muslim by force is disobeying Allah,’ he was quoted as saying. This is the first time a politician has addressed the issue of coerced conversions. Despite several reports of forced conversions, particularly of minority Hindu girls, the Pakistani government and politicians have remained silent on the practise and have done little to address the issue.
In October of last year, a parliamentary committee blocked the introduction of an anti-forced conversion bill in Parliament after the Ministry of Religious Affairs opposed the proposed law, despite protests from legislators from minority communities.
On November 26 of 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, discovered that around 1,000 girls between the ages of 12 and 25 from minorities are forcibly converted to Islam in Pakistan each year and married to their abductors. They had called the situation a ‘human-rights catastrophe’.
According to the 2017 census, Hindus make up approximately 2% of Pakistan’s population, with the vast majority of them – nearly 90% – residing in Sindh province, which borders Hindu-majority neighbour India. Last year, the US designated Pakistan as a ‘country of particular concern’ for violations of religious freedom. Sindh province passed a law making forced conversion a punishable offence in 2016, but the region’s governor refused to sign it.
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