Read The Hindu Notes of 13th April 2019 for UPSC Civil Service Examination, State Civil Service Examination and other competitive Examination

The Hindu Notes for 13th April 2019
  • Topic Discussed: The Hindu Notes of 13th April 2019

    • Message from the martyrs of Jallianwala Bagh

    They beckon all of us to give human freedom respect, human beings dignity, and human rights recognition

  • One hundred years ago, on April 12, a letter dropped into the British Raj’s postal system. The writer of the letter was a world-famous poet. That is not the only reason for the letter having been unusual. It was, by the political sights of the government of the times, seditionist. But luminously so.
  • The Raj’s censors must have been greatly tempted to see its contents; perhaps they did, spurred by the ruling ‘order’ of the day, the Rowlatt Act. Curbing, in the name of war-time discipline, every conceivable civil liberty, the Act enabled stricter control of the press, arrests without warrant, indefinite detention without trial. It empowered the police to search a place and arrest any person they disapproved of without warrant. Naturally, it outraged India, and both the writer and recipient of the letter.
  • Written on April 12, 1919, by Rabindranath Tagore to Mohandas K. Gandhi, it was about what its writer called “the great gift of freedom”. He said: “…India’s opportunity for winning it will come to her when she can prove that she is morally superior to the people who rule her by their right of conquest.”

    • ‘Faith or the life in death’

  • Tagore knew, doubtless, that the phrase “morally superior” would strike a chord in Gandhi. As would the sentence that followed: “She must willingly accept her penance of suffering, the suffering which is the crown of the great. Armed with her utter faith in goodness, she must stand unabashed before the arrogance that scoffs at the power of spirit.” Tagore ended the letter, as a poet would, with a verse: “Give me the faith of the life in death, of the victory in defeat, of the power hidden in the frailness of beauty, of the dignity of pain that accepts hurt but disdains to return it.” Prose is ever the ‘doer’, poetry the ‘artist’. And so this letter and the line just cited cannot hope to compete with Tagore’s much-quoted poem ‘Where the mind is without fear…’. But taken for itself, this sentence has to rank among the greatest expressions in prose of truth’s protest against power. Certain words, poetic word-images, in that line are scorching: death, defeat, dignity, pain, hurt.
  • India had, only a few days earlier, seen all those five word-images at play in Delhi. As the scholar-lawyer Anil Nauriya has recently reminded us, on March 30, 1919, the Raj’s police fired at a gathering in Delhi protesting the Rowlatt Act on a call by Mahatma Gandhi for a nation-wide hartal. Nauriya lists among them Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims.
  • A sample: Abdul Ghani, b. 1894. Killed in bayonet charge by a British Army unit near the Town Hall, Delhi. Atam Prakash: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Chandra Bhan, b. 1889. Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Chet Ram: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Gopi Nath, b. 1889: Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Hashmatullah Khan: b. 1890: Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Mam Raj: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Radha Saran, b. 1897: Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Radhey Shyam, b. 1891: Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Ram Lal, b. 1886: Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Ram Saroop: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Ram Singh: b. 1891: Received bullet wound in firing by an Army unit and died the same day. Chander Mal: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Seva Ram: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Swattin, son of Abdul Karim: Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day.
  • The Delhi firing was, as it were, a macabre rehearsal for what was to follow. And it was doubtless on Tagore’s mind when he wrote the letter to Gandhi. It was still in the post’s pipelines when, the next day, on April 13, 1919, his poetic vision was to find prescient corroboration. Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, Punjab not to oppose Rowlatt but for a festival that marks the Sikh new year, Baisakhi. Its intent was totally un-political. But who is to say how arrogance will work?

    • On April 13, 1919

  • What followed is now part of the world’s annals of state-led crime. Troops under the command of Brigadier General (temporary rank) Reginald Dyer entered the garden, blocking the main entrance after them, took up position on a raised bank, and on Dyer’s orders fired on the crowd for some ten minutes, minutes that were an eternity. They stopped only when the ammunition supply was almost exhausted. Official sources themselves gave a figure of 379 identified dead, with approximately 1,100 wounded. In those ten minutes Amritsar became India. It embodied a nation’s death-defying dignity in pain, hurt.
  • Tagore was, at the time of the mowing down ‘Sir’ Rabindranath. And he had been a Nobel Laureate for Literature for six years. On May 30, 1919, Tagore picked up his pen, this time, not that of a Nobel Laureate but of a Knight of the British Empire, to write a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford. “News of the sufferings,” he wrote, had “trickled through the gagged silence, reaching every corner of India”. He then said: “The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation... I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.” And he asked of the Viceroy, “relieve me of the title of knighthood”.
  • Solidarity with suffering, especially when it is spontaneous, takes many forms. One is sharing by renunciation. Tagore’s self-divestment of the title, then perhaps the most coveted, of ‘Sir’ was an act of spontaneous solidarity with the suffering of Delhi, of Amritsar. And it was a chastisement, in Tagore’s words, of the “arrogance that scoffs at the power of spirit”.
  • The martyrs of Jallianwala beckon this generation, all of us, including India and Indians, Pakistan and Pakistanis, Bangladesh and Bangladeshis, Myanmar and Myanmarese, not just Britain, to give human freedom respect, human beings dignity, human rights recognition. Looking around them at those slain — Hindu with Dalit among them, Sikh and Muslim — the martyrs of Jallianwala would want correction and atonement from those on the Indian subcontinent and beyond its boundaries, who today foment division, discord, disunity.

    • Enduring arrogance

  • They also beckon us to see that “arrogance of power” is not a colonial or imperial patent, nor “the power of spirit” an attribute of liberation struggles alone. Arrogance can occur under post-colonial, post-imperial, ‘independent’ skies and can — must — summon the power of spirit.
  • ‘Rowlatt’ is a temperament that seeks domination, control, hegemony. It has the characteristics of the bully — strength and insecurity. Asia, Africa and Latin America have known that temperament in both the hubris of the external ruler, the hauteur of the one within. And they have seen peoples’ power dismantling both. Bowing to public opinion in India and in the U.K., the Raj repealed the Rowlatt Act, the Press Act, and 22 other laws in March 1922 – a victory of the people. The Rowlatt temperament is not a feature of governments alone. It works in society as well, keeping sections of it in a state of chronic enfeeblement. The Rowlatt temperament is also to be seen in corporate India seeking monopolist domination over its natural resources and public commons.
  • This centenary of India’s rebuffing of the Rowlatt Act’s scowl through what Tagore called “the power of spirit” is one to be cherished, celebrated and be inspired by.

    • A grim future in Israel

    India needs to go beyond token homage to the cause of Palestinian freedom

  • With criminal indictment imminent on charges of corruption, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pulled off a fourth consecutive win in general elections to the Knesset on April 9. Though tied on seats with his main rival, Mr. Netanyahu has a clear pathway towards power in coalition with a bloc of right-wing allies. As with earlier wins, eked out by strongly running against counsels of sanity from the diminishing peace camp, he has pulled the political centre of gravity sharply, yet again, to the ultra-right.

    • Sources of support

  • Two notable triumphs achieved against the tide of global opinion facilitated Mr. Netanyahu’s win. In securing these, he counted on the unquestioning — and unthinking — support of the Donald Trump administration in the U.S. and the reservoir of evangelical fervour from which it draws sustenance.
  • Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents within Israel say that Mr. Trump effectively created a publicity video for him with a decree during the late days of the campaign, recognising Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. This followed Mr. Trump’s gift on the 70th anniversary of Israel’s formation last year, shifting the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and consigning the Arab third of the city’s population to a future of indefinite occupation.
  • The comatose peace process, which was never more than a charade enabling the U.S. to keep its coalition of allies in the Arab world, was declared dead then. Even Mahmoud Abbas, the normally acquiescent Palestinian Authority President, has refused all offers to resume talks since.
  • Despite his professions of hurt innocence at the Palestinian refusal, Mr. Netanyahu has proved them right in every respect. In July 2018, the Knesset enacted a Basic Law declaring Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people. Jerusalem would be its indivisible capital and Hebrew its language. The right to self-determination within the state of Israel would by law be unique to the Jewish people.
  • This is a law that puts the status of Israel’s 1.26 million Palestinian citizens and the estimated 5 million living in the West Bank and Gaza into a permanent limbo. It marks the final fruition of an effort that began in 2007, when the U.S. resumed its token effort to broker a peace after all efforts at re-engineering the regional strategic architecture, beginning with the invasion of Iraq, had failed.
  • Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of the State at the time, records her shock at the precondition set by her Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni, for returning to the talks. Under no circumstances, Ms. Livni insisted, would a peace accord grant any concession to the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, since that would be a mortal danger to Israel’s Jewish character.
  • Ms. Rice took a while to get over the implications of what she heard: “Though I understood the argument intellectually, it struck me as a harsh defence of the ethnic purity of the Israeli state... [and] shocked my sensibilities as an American. After all, the very concept of ‘American’ rejects ethnic or religious definitions of citizenship. Moreover, there were Arab citizens of Israel. Where did they fit in?”
  • The hesitancy was very brief since Ms. Rice quickly signed up for the project that had the endorsement of her right-wing fraternity in the U.S. After the George W. Bush administration vanished into history in 2008, Barack Obama sought to dissuade Israel from this insistence on ethnic purity. Mr. Trump, in his part-comical effort to be all that Mr. Obama was not, has waved on the project of Zionist purity. In tearing up the nuclear deal with Iran, Mr. Trump has also reversed other steps his predecessor took to create a new regional architecture of power through conciliation rather than coercion.

    • Strong campaign

  • Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign rhetoric since his debut in politics was often called out for incitement against the Palestinians. He excelled himself this time, vowing in the last days of the campaign to never allow a Palestinian state and to annex parts of the West Bank.
  • He is also on record telling Knesset colleagues that controlling the entire territory between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean is indispensable “for the foreseeable future”. And he has been unapologetic about “living forever by the sword” if that be Israel’s need.
  • The people of Gaza have lived through this experience after the fraudulent Israeli withdrawal of 2005 which converted the densely populated strip into the world’s largest open air prison. March 30 marked a year since the people of Gaza began their “great march of return”, a mass mobilisation demanding the UN-mandated right of refugees to return home. No less than 70% of the 2 million people in Gaza are refugees from villages and towns razed to establish Israel.
  • Israel responded to the Gaza mobilisation with brute force, killing nearly 300 people, including children and paramedics. After an inquiry, a UN Commission identified a pattern of violations of international humanitarian law, possibly amounting to war crimes, and urged individual sanctions against those responsible for Israel’s actions in Gaza.

    • The view from India

  • India continues to be among the biggest overseas patrons of the Israeli military-industrial complex. Increasingly, in the public discourse, Israel is portrayed as the role model that a “new India” should emulate in terms of its security posture in a troubled neighbourhood. The cause of Palestinian freedom continues to gain token homage, but the myth that this commitment can be “de-hyphenated” from India’s relations with Israel looks increasingly hollow.
  • A renewal of India’s commitment to Palestine should run concurrently with fighting back against the growing expressions of intolerance in political life and the shredding of the fabric of secular democracy. With Israel taking another perilous turn to the right, India’s endorsement of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, today the only option to gain justice for Palestine, seems a moral imperative.

    • Seeing darkness

    The first image of a black hole is a reassurance of science and reason

  • On April 10, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration showed the world the ‘unseeable’: the very first image of a black hole. Of course, the black hole itself cannot be seen, because light cannot escape its intense gravitational attraction. The so-called event horizon that envelops the black hole is the point of no return and any object transgressing this boundary is lost. Just outside is a region where a photon (light quantum) can orbit the black hole without falling in. This is called the ‘last photon ring’, and this is what the EHT imaged, seeing in effect the silhouette of a black hole. About a hundred years after the black hole made its way into physics through Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, soon after the LIGO collaboration first directly observed the gravitational waves made by the merging of two black holes, the ‘dark star’ had finally been imaged. The Higgs boson was detected 50 years after it had been postulated, and gravitational waves were observed a century after Einstein predicted them. Visual proof of the existence of black holes comes a century after they appeared in scientific literature. In a collaborative effort, eight telescopes around the world were used for the experiment. The challenges included making each observe the same broad range of wavelengths around 1.3 mm and having precise atomic clocks at each location, so the data could be combined.
  • A black hole marks the end of spacetime as commonly understood, and nothing that enters it can escape from the tremendous gravitational attraction. However, this is no real danger, as black holes are located at distances that humans do not have the power to scale. The EHT set out to image two candidate supermassive black holes — Sagittarius A*, which is 26,000 light years from the earth, at the centre of the Milky Way, and another which is 55 million light years away at the centre of the Messier 87 galaxy in the Virgo galaxy cluster. But the first image was of the more distant one. The very long baseline interferometry technique linked radio dishes of telescopes across the world to produce a virtual telescope the size of the earth. This was needed to obtain the high resolution required for this measurement. Combining data from telescopes, each with different characteristics, was a separate challenge. Cutting-edge developments from computer science related to image recognition were used. As Katie Bouman, Assistant Professor at the California Institute of Technology, who led the efforts to develop an algorithm to put the data together and create the image, said in a TEDx talk, projects such as the EHT succeed owing to interdisciplinary expertise that people bring to the table. This experiment endorses the diversity of collaboration just as much as it does unrelenting patience and good faith in the power of science and reason.

    • Not half-done

    Voter turnout remains high, but the ECI must be quicker in acting on code violations

  • The first phase of voting on Thursday to elect the 17th Lok Sabha witnessed enthusiastic participation of voters in 91 Lok Sabha constituencies across 20 States and Union Territories. In this opening phase of a total of seven, the challenges in ensuring a free and fair poll, as well as the trend of high enthusiasm among voters, have been highlighted. The drive of the Election Commission of India against malpractices led, ahead of the first phase, to seizures worth ₹2,426 crore of cash, liquor, drugs and other items meant to unduly influence voters. The ECI’s decision to ban the release of a biopic on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and its order to stop the broadcast of political content on a TV channel meant for his propaganda were measures in the right direction. But the trail of serious violations of the Model Code of Conduct and the defiance of its previous directives by the ruling dispensation and Mr. Modi himself raise a lot of questions regarding the ECI’s effectiveness in being a neutral and fair arbiter. The questions regarding the integrity of the elections arising out of doubts about EVMs have been addressed with 100% Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails, followed by a Supreme Court-directed increase in their random counting rate from one machine to five per Assembly constituency/segment. But doubts arising out of the ECI’s conduct fall in a different category, and it needs to do more to reassure voters that the process is not vitiated by partisanship. The seemingly biased moves by Central agencies such as the Income Tax department targeting only Opposition leaders point to the possible misuse of office by the ruling party to target opponents. Mr. Modi’s appeal to voters in the name of soldiers — something the ECI had explicitly warned against — was unfortunate, as was the Commission’s failure to take prompt action. While the ECI must urgently respond to MCC violations, the government must act fairly.
  • Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and parts of Odisha also voted to elect their State Assemblies. Tripura and West Bengal topped in turnout, with 81.8% and 81%, respectively. This is the first general election with VVPATs attached to all EVMs. According to the ECI, 1.7% of VVPATs, 0.73% of the ballot units and 0.61% of the control units of EVMs had to be replaced on Thursday. Stray incidents of violence were reported in Andhra Pradesh, but in Jammu and Kashmir the polling went relatively peacefully. In the Jammu constituency 72% polling was recorded, while in the Valley’s Baramulla constituency the figure was 35%, marginally lower than the 2014 figures. Isolated complaints regarding mismanagement arose in some parts, but by and large the first phase went on well, and upheld India’s reputation in managing what is the world’s largest democratic exercise. It is going to be a long summer.

    • In Pakistan, the problem of forced conversions

    The recent conversion of two young girls from Hinduism to Islam in Sindh has once again compelled the country to explore the possibilities of enacting a law to prevent forced conversions. But it is an uphill task, reports Mehmal Sarfraz

    Hindu Girl on Holi
  • For the Hindus of Sindh in Pakistan, March 20, the day Holi was celebrated, was a riot of colours. But for the Meghwars, it marked the beginning of a nightmare when two sisters, Reena Meghwar and Raveena Meghwar, suddenly disappeared from their home in Daharki, a city in Ghotki district of Sindh. Their disappearance not only brought back the spotlight on a persisting problem in the country, but also led to an online spat between Pakistan and India, which only recently saw simmering tensions reach a dangerous peak.

    • After a fruitless search for his sisters, Shaman, his father, and others from the community finally decided to go to the neighbourhood police station to lodge a complaint. The Station House Officer (SHO) there assured them on March 20 that the culprits would be caught. But when this did not look likely, the community staged a protest, forcing the SHO to file an FIR the next day against six men, three of them unknown, for abduction of the sisters.

  • Reena and Raveena, who are popular among their ten siblings, belong to a poor family. Their father is a tailor at a local clothes shop and makes PKR 400 (equivalent to about ₹200) for every suit he stitches. Shaman is a salesman, and earns PKR 10,000 per month. He is the only one in the family who has completed matriculation. A younger brother works at a motorcycle shop and does not earn much. The entire family’s monthly income is between PKR 15,000 and 20,000. Apart from being poor, what further puts them at a disadvantage is that they are Hindus, the largest minority community in Pakistan. Sindh is home to nearly 90% of Pakistan’s Hindu population and has a literacy rate of 55%.
  • The same day that the FIR was filed, a video of the two girls reading aloud the Kalima surfaced on social media. “We have converted to Islam,” the two of them said, the colours of Holi still on their cheeks. It emerged that both the girls had left home and travelled to Rahim Yar Khan district in Punjab. It is unclear who took them there or accompanied them. There, they got married to Safdar Ali and Barkat Ali, both of whom were already married and have children. Safdar and Barkat’s first wives left them as soon as news of the nikkah became public. The wedding took place on March 22 at an office of the Sunni Tehreek, a religious organisation, after the Bharchundi madrassa converted the girls to Islam. What remains a matter of dispute is the age of the two girls. While Shaman insists that his sisters are minors, the girls have claimed that they are above 18.
  • As though this rapid turn of events was not enough to digest for the Meghwars, the two sisters then filed a petition in the Islamabad High Court on March 25 seeking protection from their family. The court ordered the government to protect the sisters until the matter was resolved.
  • Meanwhile, a war of words erupted between India and Pakistan, with India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj seeking a report from the Indian envoy in Pakistan on the case, and Pakistan’s Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry retorting that this was an “internal issue”. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan ordered a probe to determine if the girls were abducted and then forcibly converted.

    • The issue of conversion

  • India’s concern about the case was echoed on April 2 by the Chief Justice of the Islamabad High Court, Athar Minallah, who, when the sisters were produced before the court, asked, “Why are such incidents repeatedly being reported from one district [Ghotki] of the Sindh province?”
  • His is a valid question. According to the People’s Human Rights Organisation, seven teenage Hindu girls have been kidnapped from Sindh province in the last two months alone, and forcibly converted to Islam.
  • The court formed a commission to establish the facts of the Reena-Raveena case. The commission presented its interim report to the court, soon after which the sisters were allowed to go back to their husbands. The court concluded that the girls were not forcibly converted. Das says his family is unhappy with the decision as they were not heard by the court.
  • Khawar Mumtaz, Chairperson of the National Commission on the Status of Women, who was part of the commission, says the sisters were sure about their decision. They knew before getting married that the two men were already married, she says. “These girls were institutionally facilitated. Everything appeared to have been well planned: they were taken to a religious seminary and travel arrangements were made for them. Besides, Dargah Pir Bharchundi Sharif [where the girls were converted] is known for such practices.” The court has asked the commission for a larger report on the issue of conversions on May 14.

    • The role of madrassas

  • A 2015 report by the South Asia Partnership-Pakistan in collaboration with Aurat Foundation found that that at least 1,000 girls are forcibly converted to Islam in Pakistan every year. The report stated that the conversions take place in the Thar region, particularly in the districts of Umerkot, Tharparkar, Mirpur Khas, Sanghar, Ghotki and Jacobabad. People convert due to financial and economic reasons, the report said. It identified landlords, extremist religious groups, weak local courts and an insensitive administration as working together.
  • While in south Sindh, particularly in Umerkot and Tharparkar, the Hindus are mostly poor, in the north they are better off. Largely, it is girls from low-caste, poor Hindu families who are forcibly converted.
  • The Hindus in these regions say that two madrassas — Dargah Pir Bharchundi Sharif and Dargah Pir Sarhandi — are “symbols of terror and fear”. Harris Khalique, writer and Secretary General of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, says madrassas provide an “institutional backing and that cannot happen if the state does not allow that. I rest the responsibility of such incidents squarely on the state, which fails its citizens.” These conversions reflect a potent mix of patriarchy, economic deprivation, and religious hierarchy, he says. “Most of these girls come from Scheduled Castes. The men they marry are mostly financially better off. Even if they are just marginally better off, they belong to a more privileged segment of society. It becomes a power dynamic.”
  • Under-age girls from poor farming communities are especially vulnerable to conversions, says senior journalist Shahzeb Jillani. “Wealthy Muslim farmers see them as fair game for abductions, rape, and prolonged sexual exploitation in captivity. Some notorious religious establishments proudly validate these alleged crimes. State institutions, the police and politicians have encouraged the trend by looking the other way,” he says.
  • Jillani points out that Mirpur Khas, Tharparkar and Umerkot see the highest number of conversions. “The Pakistani military has traditionally viewed this population with suspicion,” he says. “Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl runs a large well-funded madrassa, especially for new Muslim convert families near Chhor. In recent years, the army has increased its direct and indirect presence in the region by encouraging more madrassas and Islamic charity work. Jamaat-ud-Dawah and Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation are among those outfits whose presence and field work has expanded in Thar during the last five years.” Therefore, the conversion of Hindu girls in border regions has to be seen in the context of these wider developments and the Pakistani state’s security fears and paranoia vis-à-vis India, he adds.
  • Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s lawmaker Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, who founded the Pakistan Hindu Council, goes back in history to blame General Zia-ul-Haq for the present plight of minorities in Pakistan. “Minorities started to feel like ‘minorities’ during his time. As a result, low-caste Hindus were exploited by powerful people in the area. From 23% at the time of Partition, Hindus constitute around 5-6% of the total population today,” he says.
  • Speaking of the role of madrassas, Vankwani says these institutions often give money to people to convert Hindu girls to Islam. “Whenever a Muslim boy runs away with a Hindu girl, the girl is taken in by one of the three madrassas and provided shelter,” he says. “Nobody has taken notice of the threats given to the Hindu community.”
  • Unlike in countries like Malaysia, where there is a process in place for conversions, there is no such process in Pakistan, Vankwani points out. “In Malaysia, those who want to convert submit an application/affidavit saying they are adults and want to change their religion. The process takes around three months. Then, a statement is recorded by a civic authority. Conversions cannot take place without the consent of the family in case of a minor. What kind of society is this where you convert and then don’t allow them to meet their families and also get them married off within a short span of time?”
  • Asad Jamal, a lawyer, says madrassas should be prohibited from issuing conversion certificates. “Such an act should be penalised. Any law on forced conversions must have such a provision. Unless this is done, the market of conversions established by retrogressive religious groups will continue to flourish. It sustains their politics,” he says.
  • Journalist Munizae Jahangir, who has conducted several shows on forced conversions, recalls reporting on a case many years ago in which three young girls from a poor Hindu family were offered boarding by a madrassa after converting to Islam. When Jahangir asked the girls why they had converted, she says they told her that they had done so after watching a popular TV show on ‘Quran TV’. While people have the freedom to convert, there is also a system that facilitates the process, Jahangir says.
  • Not all conversions are forced though. According to a report by Ayesha Tanzeem published in the Voice of America, “Some minor girls eloped with Muslim men against their family’s wishes and changed their religion since marriage between a Muslim and a Hindu is not allowed in Islam. The parents often claimed kidnapping, since local police were unlikely to take action if it was determined the girls left willingly.” Thus, determining whether or not a case of conversion is forced or voluntary is often tricky.

    • Preventing child marriage

  • Many believe that a crucial differentiation must be made between cases of conversion of minor girls and adult women. Legal expert Reema Omer says that in cases of conversion of minor girls, the primary failure is in ensuring the implementation of the law against child marriage. Conversion becomes a secondary issue in these cases, she says. “This includes the lax attitude of families as well as the state on timely birth registrations. It also includes the state’s apathy in ensuring that such marriages are stopped and the perpetrators are penalised.”
  • Given the conflicting reports on Reena and Raveena’s age, the question to be asked is, why were their births not registered soon after they were born? While Das says birth certificates were “not really a priority for the family”, locals say the process of registering births and deaths is cumbersome. This omission is what allows families to get away with child marriage, says Omer.
  • A medical report presented before the court stated that the two girls are not minors. In addition, a source in the Sindh government told The Hindu on the condition of anonymity that Reena and Raveena’s call data show that they were regularly in touch with the men they married. The police also claim that the girls married of their own free will. Das and his family refuse to believe this. “We had never seen these men. We saw them for the first time in the nikkah video,” Das says.
  • Sulema Jahangir, an advocate of the High Courts in Pakistan, says that while conversions of underage girls is a cause for concern, there are also instances of older women converting voluntarily to Islam to escape an abusive marriage, hinting at the complexities involved in the issue. When the Sindh Hindu marriage law was being debated a few years ago, a lot of Hindu groups protested against allowing women the right to divorce and remarry. Some experts believe that it is important not to give the state greater control over women’s lives.
  • Chaudhry says minorities face problems everywhere in the world. “In this case, we have once again proved that the state of Pakistan stands with its minorities and marginalised communities/groups. The state has not abdicated its responsibility. The only problem is that if an adult takes a decision herself/himself, and gives a statement in the court of law, then we cannot interfere in such cases. Our policy, though, is very clear on minority rights — we are against any forced conversions and we will not let that happen,” he says.
  • A Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf lawmaker says on the condition of anonymity that the Prime Minister is not too keen to dwell on this issue fearing backlash from powerful religious groups.

    • Pending legislation

  • Three years ago, the Sindh Assembly unanimously passed the Sindh Criminal Law (Protection of Minorities) Bill, 2015, which made forced conversions punishable by law. But following a backlash from conservative Muslim groups, the legislation never saw the light of the day.
  • Asad Jamal, a lawyer, says the main failure lies in preventing child marriage. But what makes the situation trickier is the fact that the the minimum age for marriage varies across regions. In Punjab, it is 16 for girls and 18 for boys. In Sindh, it is 18 for both girls and boys. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, the legal marriageable age for girls is 14 in accordance with the original Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929. “There is a law against child marriage, but it is inadequate,” says Jamal. “All child marriages under the age of 18 should be prohibited and declared invalid.”
  • Murtaza Wahab, adviser on information and law to the Sindh Chief Minister, says that in principle, the Sindh government has decided to reconsider the forced conversions Bill. “We will start the consultation process again. We will have consultations with the Hindu community as well as those from the religious school of thought regarding the age limit for conversions, which was the main bone of contention the last time around,” he says.
  • Pakistan’s lawmakers are slowly realising that until such time that a law is enacted on conversions and strictly implemented, it will be an uphill task to put a stop to forced conversions.