Published: 04:24 PM, 27 February 2026
Converting Impunity: How Hindu and Christian Girls Face Institutionalized Persecution in Pakistan
In July last year, a 13-year-old Christian girl named Maria Shahbaz was abducted from her home. Within days, she had been forcibly converted to Islam and married to a 30-year-old Muslim man. When her parents appeared before Pakistan’s Federal Constitutional Court in Lahore on February 3, 2026, armed with documentary evidence of their daughter’s age, the judges dismissed it. They declared the marriage valid and sent Maria back to her abductor. Her case is not exceptional. The pattern remains consistent across years and provinces in Pakistan, where Hindu and Christian girls are abducted, forced into conversion, and subjected to fabricated or falsified marriage papers, with police, clerics, and courts often complicit.
According to reports by the Movement for Solidarity and Peace in Pakistan, an estimated 1,000 girls from religious minorities are forcibly converted to Islam and married to Muslim men every year. According to the Centre for Social Justice’s Human Rights Observer 2025, at least 68 girls, 47 Hindu and 21 Christian, were abducted and forcibly converted in 2024 alone, with the actual figure assumed to be far higher given how many cases go unreported.
The geography of this crisis runs along predictable lines of vulnerability. More than 90 percent of Pakistan’s Hindu population lives in Sindh, and it is here that most abduction cases are concentrated, particularly among Dalit Hindu communities, the Bheel, Meghwar, and Kohli, whose social and economic marginalization makes them easy targets. The Pir Sarhandi shrine in Pakistan’s Umerkot region in Sindh has been identified by rights organizations as one of the most notorious centers for the conversion of Hindu girls and women, with victims reportedly as young as 12 to 15 years old. Cases in Punjab follow a similar template but often exploit inter-provincial legal asymmetries: girls abducted in Sindh, where a minimum marriage age of 18 has been law since 2013, have been transported to Punjab to be married under older, more permissive legislation.
The cases that surfaced in 2025 make for a harrowing record. Four Hindu children — Jiya, aged 22, Diya, 20, Disha, 16, and Ganesh Kumar, 14 — were abducted from their home in Shahdadpur, Sanghar District of Sindh. Within 48 hours, videos appeared online showing them reciting the Islamic declaration of faith. Their names were changed. Similarly, a 16-year-old Christian girl was abducted from her home and married to a 28-year-old Muslim man. She later told investigators that she had been coerced into placing her thumb impressions on blank papers, which were then used to fabricate her conversion and marriage. During the three months of their “marriage,” she was sexually assaulted, physically and psychologically abused, drugged, and forced into prostitution. In December 2025, a 15-year-old Hindu girl, Premi Bhil, was abducted from Sindh province, forcibly converted, renamed Kulsoom Sheikh, and married to a man more than 30 years her senior who was already married.
A 2025 report published by the Global Hindu Temple Network, drawing on verified data covering 2021 to 2025, found that in more than 70 percent of documented forced conversion cases, police either refused to register First Information Reports or later diluted them under external pressure. UN Special Rapporteurs have expressed concern that courts routinely invoke religious law to validate coerced conversions and marriages, keeping victims with their abductors rather than returning them to their parents, while perpetrators escape accountability as police dismiss these crimes as “love marriages.”
Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), a constitutional advisory body, has been one of the most consistent institutional obstacles to reform. Last year, the CII declared the anti-child marriage bill passed by both houses of Parliament to be “un-Islamic,” arguing that the legislation contradicted Sharia law. It condemned Pakistan’s Child Marriage Restraint Bill as un-Islamic, directly undermining its potential to address forced conversions nationwide. Bills proposed to criminalize forced conversions have been blocked at the federal and provincial level for years, vetoed or diluted under pressure from powerful religious organizations whose political support successive governments have been unwilling to forfeit. Many political parties lack the will to take a stand against religious groups, and in some cases perpetrators have strong ties with local politicians and officials, enabling them to carry out forced conversions with apparent impunity.
The Sunni-dominated establishment does not merely tolerate forced conversions as a byproduct of mismanaged pluralism; in many documented instances, state actors are active facilitators. The Lahore High Court held in September 2025 that under Islamic law, a marriage entered into after reaching puberty is valid, even for children under the legal minimum marriage age of 16 in Punjab. This judicial position gives institutional cover to the abductors.
Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026 notes that blasphemy-related attacks on religious minorities increased in 2025, fuelled by discriminatory legislation and government inaction, while women from religious minority communities remained particularly at risk for forced marriage and conversion. The Open Doors 2026 World Watch List ranks Pakistan eighth among the most dangerous countries in the world for Christians. The Pakistan Hindu Council maintains that forced conversions are the primary reason for the declining Hindu population in the country, with an estimated 5,000 Hindus migrating to India every year out of fear.
Legislative reform and judicial practice in Pakistan are operating in two entirely different registers, and it is the courts and police who determine what actually happens to a 13-year-old girl from a minority community. Many activists have been questioning how Pakistan continues to receive billions in international development funding, from institutes like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, while tolerating gross violations of its minority girls’ fundamental rights.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has described the situation starkly. UN experts stated, “Christian and Hindu girls remain particularly vulnerable to forced religious conversion, abduction, trafficking, child, early and forced marriage, domestic servitude and sexual violence.” OHCHR Pakistan has received this criticism, acknowledged it in successive Universal Periodic Reviews, and carried on. What is taking place in Sindh and Punjab is not a governance failure in the ordinary sense. It is a policy choice, made repeatedly and in full knowledge of its consequences for the most vulnerable girls in an already deeply unequal society.
>> Source: European Times
According to reports by the Movement for Solidarity and Peace in Pakistan, an estimated 1,000 girls from religious minorities are forcibly converted to Islam and married to Muslim men every year. According to the Centre for Social Justice’s Human Rights Observer 2025, at least 68 girls, 47 Hindu and 21 Christian, were abducted and forcibly converted in 2024 alone, with the actual figure assumed to be far higher given how many cases go unreported.
The geography of this crisis runs along predictable lines of vulnerability. More than 90 percent of Pakistan’s Hindu population lives in Sindh, and it is here that most abduction cases are concentrated, particularly among Dalit Hindu communities, the Bheel, Meghwar, and Kohli, whose social and economic marginalization makes them easy targets. The Pir Sarhandi shrine in Pakistan’s Umerkot region in Sindh has been identified by rights organizations as one of the most notorious centers for the conversion of Hindu girls and women, with victims reportedly as young as 12 to 15 years old. Cases in Punjab follow a similar template but often exploit inter-provincial legal asymmetries: girls abducted in Sindh, where a minimum marriage age of 18 has been law since 2013, have been transported to Punjab to be married under older, more permissive legislation.
The cases that surfaced in 2025 make for a harrowing record. Four Hindu children — Jiya, aged 22, Diya, 20, Disha, 16, and Ganesh Kumar, 14 — were abducted from their home in Shahdadpur, Sanghar District of Sindh. Within 48 hours, videos appeared online showing them reciting the Islamic declaration of faith. Their names were changed. Similarly, a 16-year-old Christian girl was abducted from her home and married to a 28-year-old Muslim man. She later told investigators that she had been coerced into placing her thumb impressions on blank papers, which were then used to fabricate her conversion and marriage. During the three months of their “marriage,” she was sexually assaulted, physically and psychologically abused, drugged, and forced into prostitution. In December 2025, a 15-year-old Hindu girl, Premi Bhil, was abducted from Sindh province, forcibly converted, renamed Kulsoom Sheikh, and married to a man more than 30 years her senior who was already married.
A 2025 report published by the Global Hindu Temple Network, drawing on verified data covering 2021 to 2025, found that in more than 70 percent of documented forced conversion cases, police either refused to register First Information Reports or later diluted them under external pressure. UN Special Rapporteurs have expressed concern that courts routinely invoke religious law to validate coerced conversions and marriages, keeping victims with their abductors rather than returning them to their parents, while perpetrators escape accountability as police dismiss these crimes as “love marriages.”
Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), a constitutional advisory body, has been one of the most consistent institutional obstacles to reform. Last year, the CII declared the anti-child marriage bill passed by both houses of Parliament to be “un-Islamic,” arguing that the legislation contradicted Sharia law. It condemned Pakistan’s Child Marriage Restraint Bill as un-Islamic, directly undermining its potential to address forced conversions nationwide. Bills proposed to criminalize forced conversions have been blocked at the federal and provincial level for years, vetoed or diluted under pressure from powerful religious organizations whose political support successive governments have been unwilling to forfeit. Many political parties lack the will to take a stand against religious groups, and in some cases perpetrators have strong ties with local politicians and officials, enabling them to carry out forced conversions with apparent impunity.
The Sunni-dominated establishment does not merely tolerate forced conversions as a byproduct of mismanaged pluralism; in many documented instances, state actors are active facilitators. The Lahore High Court held in September 2025 that under Islamic law, a marriage entered into after reaching puberty is valid, even for children under the legal minimum marriage age of 16 in Punjab. This judicial position gives institutional cover to the abductors.
Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026 notes that blasphemy-related attacks on religious minorities increased in 2025, fuelled by discriminatory legislation and government inaction, while women from religious minority communities remained particularly at risk for forced marriage and conversion. The Open Doors 2026 World Watch List ranks Pakistan eighth among the most dangerous countries in the world for Christians. The Pakistan Hindu Council maintains that forced conversions are the primary reason for the declining Hindu population in the country, with an estimated 5,000 Hindus migrating to India every year out of fear.
Legislative reform and judicial practice in Pakistan are operating in two entirely different registers, and it is the courts and police who determine what actually happens to a 13-year-old girl from a minority community. Many activists have been questioning how Pakistan continues to receive billions in international development funding, from institutes like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, while tolerating gross violations of its minority girls’ fundamental rights.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has described the situation starkly. UN experts stated, “Christian and Hindu girls remain particularly vulnerable to forced religious conversion, abduction, trafficking, child, early and forced marriage, domestic servitude and sexual violence.” OHCHR Pakistan has received this criticism, acknowledged it in successive Universal Periodic Reviews, and carried on. What is taking place in Sindh and Punjab is not a governance failure in the ordinary sense. It is a policy choice, made repeatedly and in full knowledge of its consequences for the most vulnerable girls in an already deeply unequal society.
>> Source: European Times
