KARACHI: The issue of forced conversions and marriages in Pakistan has a historical context. It has its roots in pre-partition British marriage laws, because the British thought of Indian society as backward and irrational. This was the core of the arguments given by researcher Ghazal Farrukhi in her presentation titled ‘Pakistani bureaucracy and forced conversion’ at the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s office here on Friday.

Ms Farrukhi, who is pursuing a PhD in anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University, said her research was more of an exploratory nature with regard to the relationship between the Pakistani state and the Hindu population of Sindh. She defined the discipline of anthropology as a qualitative one, based on participatory observations.

Ms Farrukhi said the issue of forced conversions had existed for many years but came to national prominence in 2012 with the high-profile Rinkal Kumari case, blurring the line between forced conversion and forced marriage. Such cases overwhelmingly involved young women from Sindh and southern Punjab who would go missing and months later resurface, converted to Islam. Their parents would go to the police to report kidnapping but subsequently questions such as ‘did she elope with a Muslim man’ would arise.

Parents’ consent is needed even for a love marriage

Ms Farrukhi said after 2012 these cases were widely reported by the media — the right wing Urdu newspapers would term them the ‘woman’s love of Islam’ and the liberal media would call it a conversion, occasionally denouncing kidnapping, therefore the line between kidnapping and elopement got blurred. The issue involved different legal matters which was why it’s important to know its historical context, she said.

Ms Farrukhi then spoke on the laws forming the Indian Penal Code of the late 19th century which continued after partition in both India and Pakistan. She argued that the British thought of the subcontinent as a deeply backward and irrational society that needed to be shepherded into modernity; at the same time they did not want British superiority to be challenged. They had a poor understanding of Indian society but were confident of what laws they were making. They thought that religions in India had codified predetermined laws, so they made different laws for each religion. The colonial version of secularism could only happen on British terms, she added.

Ms Farrukhi said after 1947 not many changes were made to the colonial system that we inherited. In India they introduced the Hindu Marriage Act, and in our country there was the Muslim Family Law Ordinance of 1962 — and nothing else. As a result, in Pakistan Hindu marriages were not registered legally as Muslim marriages. Some concerns had been raised in the Sindh Assembly lately, though in general there’s a “lack of regard for updated Hindu laws”, she remarked. In India conversions took place even in inter-religion marriages. In Pakistan after 1947 things became more complicated as currently there’s a discriminatory legal framework as to who could marry whom, she said.

Talking about her research findings, Ms Farrukhi mentioned that there were a few trends in South Asia as far as the issue of kidnapping/elopement was concerned. Sometimes keeping their social status in mind, the parents of the girl often reported elopement as kidnapping. Then if you were Muslim even for a love marriage you needed parents’ consent. This issue was resolved by the Federal Shariat Court in Pakistan, which said that after a certain age the girl was allowed to marry whoever she wanted, she told the audience, who were at the HRCP office in a decent number.

With reference to the Hindu community, Ms Farrukhi said the laws in Pakistan were not updated. “They have been suspended in a legal vacuum,” she articulated. Yet, she pointed out, there was a mixture of things related to the bureaucracy and the state resulting in the resolution of such issues, as it’s hard to tell which law was used at what instance. This meant there were “varying degrees of success”.

Replying to a question asked by a member of the audience, Ms Farrukhi said girls belonging to the Christian community, mostly in south Punjab, also suffered from forced conversion but there were two relevant things to understand: one, they were called Ahl-i-Kitab and therefore marriageable; two, there existed a caste system in that part of the country and these were usually low-caste girls.

Published in Dawn, August 1st, 2015

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