Minor Hindu girl abducted, forcibly converted to Islam and married off to a Muslim man in Pakistan

Case ID : e979f3f | Location : Sindh, Pakistan | Date of Incident : Thu, 1 June, 2023

Case ID : e979f3f

Sindh, Pakistan

1 June, 2023

Minor Hindu girl abducted, forcibly converted to Islam and married off to a Muslim man in Pakistan

Predatory Proselytisation

Harassment, threats, coercion for conversion

Case Summary

Sohana Sharma Kumari, a 14-year-old Hindu girl from Benazirabad district, Sindh, Pakistan, was abducted, forcibly converted to Islam, and married off to a Muslim man on June 2, 2023. Despite her appeals to return to her parents, a Pakistani court initially refused, citing her statement appeared under pressure. She was kidnapped at gunpoint by her tutor and his aides in front of her mother. Sohana’s father Dilip Kumar, filed a police report saying that she had been abducted. Later, Sohana appeared in a video clearly stating that she had converted to Islam and married a Muslim man under pressure. Her parents, on the other hand, argued that she was a minor. On Friday, June 9, Sohana was brought to the district court in Larkana, where she told the judge in her statement that she had been abducted and forced to convert to Islam. She also expressed her wish to return to her parents. The judge, however, adjourned the case until June 12 since she appeared to be under ‘pressure’ when giving her statement and remanded her to a women’s shelter home.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

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 on discriminatory grounds which has the effect of nullifying a person’s rights or infringing upon his freedom to exercise his right 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 cases documented, 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. In this subcategory, we would only include cases where the victim was harassed, threatened or coerced to convert. Cases where attempts were made to convert but the victim resisted would be documented in another sub-category. Such cases where Hindu victims are harassed to convert to the perpetrator’s religion are rooted in animosity towards the victim’s religious identity and are therefore documented as religiously motivated hate crimes. In this case, the Hindu minor girl was abducted and kept in confinement. This itself is a severe form of intimidation. The purpose behind this was to coerce the victim to abandon her faith and accept Islam. The underlying motivation of predatory proselytisation itself is animosity towards the professed faith of the victim. In this case, there was harassment involved in the pressure exerted to forcefully convert the Hindu girl. Further, the central aim of the perpetrators was to disenfranchise the Hindu girl from her professed faith. Since the central motivation is religion, this case has been added as a hate crime.