Case Summary

In Tando Allahyar, Pakistan, two minor Hindu sisters were abducted, forcibly converted to Islam and married to two Muslim men. The sisters were abducted from their hometown, pressured to convert to Islam and forcibly married to Amjad Solangi and Mansoor Solangi. As per the media report, The Sindh Renaissance, the sisters were identified as Roopi and Seeta, residents of Ibrahim Colony in Tando Allahyar. Their father, Raamji, approached the authorities after the girls went missing, prompting calls for an investigation. An FIR was filed under Section 365-B of the Pakistan Penal Code on the complaint of their family. According to the complaint, the sisters were abducted from their residence and subsequently taken to an undisclosed location, where they were pressured to convert to Islam. Thereafter, they were married to Amjad Solangi and Mansoor Solangi, respectively. As per the family, both the sisters were minors. Further information provided by people and as per the official documentation, one girl was 13, and the other was 14 years of age. The veracity of those documents was pending verification at the time of writing the report. No details were available about the culprits who abducted the sisters, nor was there any news on whether Amjad Solangi and Mansoor Solangi were prosecuted or arrested. As per the information, both girls fell within the definition of a child under Sindh law. The Sindh Child Marriages Restraint Act, 2013 defines a child as any person, male or female, under 18 years of age. It further provides imprisonment of between two and three years, along with a fine, for a male above 18 who contracts a child marriage. It also provides punishment for anyone who performs, conducts, directs, facilitates or otherwise brings about a child marriage. The incident once again brought attention to longstanding concerns surrounding forced conversions, abductions and marriages involving women and girls from religious minority communities, particularly Hindus in Pakistan. Rights groups had for years raised concerns about cases involving Hindu and other minority women, particularly those belonging to economically disadvantaged families. Such cases frequently involved abduction, pressure to change religion and marriage without the consent of the woman or her family. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan had previously cited estimates suggesting that hundreds of minority girls were subjected to coercion, abduction or pressure to convert and marry every year, with Hindu girls identified by rights groups as a significant proportion of reported cases. The Hinduphobia Tracker had previously documented numerous cases where minor Hindu girls as young as nine years old were abducted, raped and forcibly converted to Islam by Muslim perpetrators and then coerced to marry the perpetrators. For instance, in February 2026, in Mirpurkhas, Sindh, a 13-year-old minor Dalit Hindu girl named Guddi Kolhi was abducted from Mithi, Tharparakar district, Sindh province. Following her abduction, she was forcibly converted and married to a Muslim man. The incident came to light when the victim’s family approached the authorities seeking justice. According to information shared by the victim’s family and local sources, documents issued by a so-called conversion centre linked to Pir Ayub Jan Sarhandi falsely listed the girl’s age as 19 years and passed off the marriage as a legal marriage. In another instance in April 2026, in Sindh, a nine-year-old Hindu girl named Reshma was abducted, forcibly converted to Islam, and married to a 45-year-old Muslim man identified as Wazir Hussain. She was taken to a Sufi Dargah for her conversion. The case came to public attention when images of the child in wedding attire went viral. Human rights activists demanded the immediate annulment of the marriage and the safe return of the child, citing violations of child protection laws and fundamental human rights. Time and again, such cases highlighted the persecution faced by Hindu minorities in Pakistan, marked by systemic discrimination, violence, and forced conversions. Hindu women were often abducted, forcibly converted to Islam, and married off to Muslim men with little to no legal recourse. Temples were frequently vandalised or destroyed, and Hindu communities were subjected to social and economic marginalisation. Blasphemy laws were disproportionately used against Hindus, leading to false accusations and severe punishments. Many Hindu families were forced to flee their homes due to religious intolerance, living in constant fear of attacks. This sustained persecution highlighted the dire conditions for Hindus in Pakistan, where their religious identity made them targets of oppression.

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Why it is Hate Crime ?

This case has been added to the tracker under the primary category: Predatory Proselytisation. Within this, the subcategory selected is: Harassment, threats, coercion for conversion. Harassment covers a wide range of behaviours of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behaviour that demeans, humiliates, and intimidates a person, including threats and coercion. Harassment and threats, in this case, find their root in discriminatory grounds, which have the effect of nullifying a person’s rights or infringing upon his freedom to exercise his rights specifically owing to the victim’s religious identity. Verbal and physical threats and psychological or physical harassment are often used against Hindu victims because they choose to practice their professed religion. Religious harassment also includes forced and involuntary conversions by harassment, threats or coercion. Coercion includes intimidatory tactics like force-feeding a Hindu victim beef to convert to another religion, forceful circumcision, etc. In several documented cases, non-Hindu perpetrators or those who harbour specific animosity towards Hinduism harass victims simply based on their religious identity. Such cases often also include harassment to ensure the Hindu victim abandons his/her professed religion and adopts the religion of the perpetrator. The other subcategory selected is: Proselytisation by grooming, brainwashing, manipulation or subtle indoctrination. The tertiary category under it is: 'Conversion of minor' Religious brainwashing essentially means the often subtle and forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up their religious beliefs to accept contrasting, regimented ideas. Religious grooming or brainwashing also involves propaganda and manipulation. It involves the systematic effort, driven by religious malice and indoctrination, to persuade “non-believers’ to accept allegiance, command, or doctrine to and of a contrasting faith. Cases of such grooming or brainwashing are far more nuanced than direct threats, coercion, inducement and violence. In such cases, it is often seen that there is repeated, subtle and continual manipulation of the victim to induce disaffection towards their own faith and acceptance of the contrasting faith of the perpetrator. While subtle indoctrination is widely acknowledged as predatory, an element which is often understated in such conversions or in the attempts at such conversion is the role of loyalty and trust which might develop between the perpetrator and the victim. Fiduciary relationships are often abused to affect such religious conversion. For example, an educator transmitting religious doctrine of a competing faith to a Hindu student. The Hindu student is likely to accept what the teacher is transmitting owing to the existence of the fiduciary relationship. The exploitation of the fiduciary relationship to religiously indoctrinate victims would also be included in this category. Since the underlying animosity towards the victim’s faith forms the basis of predatory proselytisation, such cases are considered religiously motivated hate crimes. This case was added to the Hinduphobia tracker as a religiously motivated hate crime because the hostility directed against the victims demonstrated that their Hindu identity was central to the offence. The two sisters were targeted as Hindu girls, and this was reflected in what followed their abduction: pressure to abandon Hinduism and convert to Islam. A key point was that the victims were minors, aged 13 and 14 years. This negated any element of consent or voluntary change of faith. Children at this age, still navigating emotional and cognitive development, are especially susceptible to coercion and manipulation, rendering them easy targets for those exploiting religious vulnerabilities. The forced conversion and marriage of these Hindu children constituted a clear hate crime and violation of human rights and child protection norms. The forced conversion and subsequent marriage showcased clear religious animosity. This act violated their autonomy and religious rights by targeting them specifically for their Hindu identity, forcibly stripping them of their faith and imposing Islam upon them. The marriages compounded this by infringing on their human rights as Hindu minors, amounting to religiously motivated hate crimes. The religious nature of the offence was further established by the fact that conversion was made part of the coercive process. The purpose was not simply to control the victims but to compel a change in the religion they professed. Such conduct directly interfered with their freedom of conscience and religion. When coercion is used to make Hindus abandon their faith and adopt the religion of the perpetrators, the harassment acquires a distinctly religious character. The forced marriages further reinforced this religious dimension. Marriage in this context was not an isolated personal act but followed the attempt to impose a different religious identity upon the victims. The sequence of first coercing the girls to convert and then marrying them to men of the new faith serves to consolidate the conversion and prevent them from resisting or returning to their original religious and social environment. The marriages create an additional layer of control over the victims after their religious identity has already been targeted, isolating them from their family, community and religious roots. The circumstances also demonstrated how religious coercion could operate through the isolation of Hindu victims from their family and community. By taking them away from their hometown and placing them in an unfamiliar environment, the perpetrators would deprive them of the support system through which they could resist the pressure being imposed upon them, making the religious coercion more effective. The case also reflected the particular vulnerability of Hindu women and girls in Pakistan to religious coercion. The repeated occurrence of abduction, conversion and marriage involving Hindu victims demonstrated that such conduct cannot always be viewed as an ordinary criminal dispute when the victims' religious identity is directly followed by an attempt to change that identity. The present case fits this wider pattern because the coercion was specifically directed towards replacing the victims' Hindu faith. The fact that authoritative records on the girls' ages, conversions and marriages have not been released is also significant. In numerous such cases, victims who are abducted or converted against their will are kept away from their families and placed in environments where they can be pressured. In such settings, they are forced to record videos wherein the girls state that they are major ( more than 18 years of age) and reportedly married with their consent. They are made to state all such statements under coercion. Until police, courts or other competent authorities release verified findings, claims regarding abduction, forced conversion or the exact ages of the girls should be treated as allegations rather than facts. Overall, since this case meets the parameters of a religiously driven hate crime, it is added to the hate crime database of the Hinduphobia Tracker. Disclaimer: The Hinduphobia Tracker records incidents based on when an event occurred or when the victims' ordeal began rather than when the media reported it. Since the media source does not mention when the sisters were abducted, for documentation purposes, the date of reporting has been used as the date of the incident. In this case, there could be more than one perpetrator involved; the media reports identified only two Muslim perpetrators by name, Amjad Solangi and Mansoor Solangi. Therefore, the perpetrator count was recorded as two (2). This is a conservative estimate recorded for documentation purposes only.