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SARDAR Kalyan Singh, a teacher at a government-run college in Gujranwala, considers himself to be among a small minority of fortunate Sikhs for having managed to get his marriage registered, albeit following a tedious six-month legal proceeding in court. The crux of the problem is that there is no marriage law for Pakistan’s Sikh or Hindu communities on the statute books. According to Mr Singh, a large majority of Sikh marriages in the country do not ‘officially’ exist.
Among the host of challenges facing our religious minorities, the absence of marriage legalisation and non-registration for the issuance of Computerised National Identity Cards (CNICs) are the most pressing for a substantial portion of these communities.
CNICs are the very foundation of citizenship, and their denial or delayed issuance impacts the minorities’ economic and political rights. The issue of marriage legalisation mainly concerns Hindu and Sikh communities as well as several Christians belonging to new denominations.
Marriage legalisation is often a concern for minorities.
Non-registration for CNICs is a major problem for those minorities who, from 1999 onwards, have migrated from Fata to the settled areas in the wake of the Taliban ascendancy. Hindu tenants on farms in Sindh and Christian bonded labour in Punjab’s brick kilns are also among those whose majority does not possess CNICs because they lack permanent addresses, a mandatory condition for registration.
Legislation pertaining to marriages of Hindus and Sikhs has long remained in cold storage, although in 1999 a three-member Supreme Court bench had directed the government to enact relevant laws. The court had then been hearing a suo motu case on the application of a Hindu couple from Rahim Yar Khan regarding the problems faced by their community in acquiring identity cards and non-registration of marriages. The absence of a marriage law also makes it difficult for women from these communities to change their names after marriage in their CNICs and passports.
Before the 2008 general elections, a law was drafted to legalise the marriages of Sikhs and Hindus but it was not tabled in parliament. Following the 18th Amendment, the registration of marriages became a provincial subject and the issue has been awaiting legislation since then. The Sindh Assembly has asked the provincial law ministry to formulate a draft bill on Hindu marriages. The legislature needs to push the law ministry to expedite its work so that it can get the bill passed into law, thereby perhaps prompting the other provinces to follow suit.
Under the law, a union council registers the marriage of a Muslim but not that of anyone belonging to minority communities. In the case of Christians, their two main churches, the Roman Catholic Church and Church of Pakistan (Protestants), have the authority to issue marriage certificates. However, in recent years, a large number of Christians, estimated by some to be one-fourth of the entire Christian population in Pakistan, have embraced several new denominations which are not part of the two main churches whose marriage certificates are recognised by Nadra.
Those becoming part of another Christian sect thus have great difficulty in getting their marriages registered. Often, they have to show themselves as members of the recognised denominations. The federal ministry for minorities can resolve this by recognising the new denominations as registrars of marriages in the same way as it had done in the case of the older denominations.
Similarly, registration with Nadra to obtain CNICs is a big headache for a section of the minorities. According to several members of the Sikh community, a large proportion of the estimated 15,000-strong community, and mostly those displaced from Fata, do not possess CNICs or B-forms. George Clement, a former Christian MP, says that Christians migrating from Fata also face the same problem as Nadra does not have their records in its database.
According to retired Justice Mehta Kailash Kohli, a human rights activist, a large number of Hindu children cannot obtain B-forms because they don’t possess any proof of their parents’ marriage. It’s a double whammy for scheduled caste Hindus who thus face discrimination both from the state and upper caste Hindus. During the last few years, following the Supreme Court’s 1999 instruction, Nadra has improved its registration of Hindu communities on the basis of verification issued by Hindu panchayats but the procedure nevertheless remains cumbersome.
Recently, the federal government has issued a notification ordering Nadra to ensure the registration of non-Muslims but the authority has not yet implemented the order. Nadra must take steps to register minority citizens and provide doorstep services to unregistered members of these communities, especially those working on farms in remote rural areas and at brick kilns. Similarly, efforts should also be made to speed up the process of codification of personal laws for Hindu and Sikh communities, and in consultation with them.
The writer is a journalist and researcher based in Lahore.
Published in Dawn, December 12th, 2014
