Study: Indian Muslims Worse Off Than Untouchables and Falling Further

[Oneloveheretic]

no I did not. I said the female senior managers that I work with, i.e. well educated women who hold good jobs and also raise a family. You should've read ahead on what I wrote. I spoke about moms going back to work 1 month after childbirth (1 month vs 2 weeks = big whoop).

Frankly, you've made several generalized and misogynistic statements about women in your original post, and then about the women in my country. Even if one accepts your anecdotal statements of senior management women in your organization; the link I submitted states the highly educated new mothers in the U.S. take around only six weeks or less of leave before heading back to work.

Even the most educated women with children choose to spend at least 3 to 5 years with their young children and go back into the workforce when the children are of school age. I should know, I work in a senior management position in a well known tech firm and have female coworkers who are highly educated mothers AND senior managers just like me. The common history that they ALL share is that when they became mothers, they chose to put their careers on hold, stay at home with their children for 3 to 5 years and then continue with their careers

 

[GumNaam]

Frankly, you've made several generalized and misogynistic statements about women in your original post, and then about the women in my country. Even if one accepts your anecdotal statements of senior management women in your organization; the link I submitted states the highly educated new mothers in the U.S. take around only six weeks or less of leave before heading back to work.

buddy I maybe an immigrant and a naturalized citizen but have been here since childhood and as such, am MOST PROBABLY much older than you and have seen quiet the opposite IN GENERAL mean 80 out of a 100 women who have a significant other committed partner DO in fact choose to say home for a few years with their child albeit there are 20 who do choose to go to work shortly afterwards. And there is a problem with "single mother", YES PROBLEM WITH "SINGLE MOTHERS" who can't get the father to stick around to save their lives or have gone to the "bank" get a child, they have no CHOICE to go back to work. now, if THAT makes me a "misogynistic" then have at it, I could REALLY care less, let the misogyny begin...eat your heart out neo-feminism!

 

[Oneloveheretic]

buddy I maybe an immigrant and a naturalized citizen but have been here since childhood and as such, am MOST PROBABLY much older than you and have seen quiet the opposite IN GENERAL mean 80 out of a 100 women who have a significant other committed partner DO in fact choose to say home for a few years with their child albeit there are 20 who do choose to go to work shortly afterwards. And there is a problem with "single mother", YES PROBLEM WITH "SINGLE MOTHERS" who can't get the father to stick around to save their lives or have gone to the "bank" get a child, they have no CHOICE to go back to work. now, if THAT makes me a "misogynistic" then have at it, I could REALLY care less, let the misogyny begin...eat your heart out neo-feminism!

Your anecdotal evidence does not trump facts. I've submitted you a link which spoke of the results of research done on American mothers, and it contradicts your assumptions. You are willfully misrepresenting women and new mothers in my country.

And your misogyny reared its head when you made the following statement "every woman is a future potential mother, and as such, it is built into her nature that she would prefer to stay home with her children."

Such a statement shows primitive cultural attitudes.

 

[GumNaam]

Your anecdotal evidence does not trump facts. I've submitted you a link which spoke of the results of research done on American mothers, and it contradicts your assumptions. You are willfully misrepresenting women and new mothers in my country.

And your misogyny reared its head when you made the following statement "every woman is a future potential mother, and as such, it is built into her nature that she would prefer to stay home with her children." This shows primitive cultural attitudes.

as I said, I really could care less if you think I'm "showing" my misogyny. if you find that as if I'm "mansplaining" well then that's just too bad cuz I'll do JUST that as I "manspread". incidentally, the "facts" that you mentioned, how many of those women are married or otherwise have a committed partner that is the father? and the ones who DO have fathers, how many of those fathers are actually stepping up and supporting the mother of their child(ren)? You want to talk facts then LET'S TALK FACTS! Ever heard of the saying that "all the good men are taken" and "feminism has ruined relationships for us"? Yeah, these aren't statements coming from MY "primitive" culture, these are statements made by your average american woman! "MEN", "FATHERS", "GOOD FATHERS" have a role to play in civilization, society and home. ignore their role at your own peril and that is EXACTLY what is happening today.

 

[illusion8]

They work at home proudly.

Life is not all about money and you will get to know that when you will have very little life left.

Proudly? I don't think so. They are restricted from pursuing a proper education or a career.

Also, working at home doesn't feed the 7-8 or more mouths on the man's income who himself isn't too well to do because he too came from a similar environment of low development.

 

[Hellfire]

https://www.riazhaq.com/2017/07/fact-checking-farahnaz-ispahanis-claims.html


In "Purifying the Land of the Pure", the author Ms. Farahnaz Ispahani, the wife of Mr. Husain Haqqani who served as Pakistan's Ambassador in Washington from 2008 to 2011, asserts that "by 1949, the non-Muslim population of Pakistan had been significantly diluted.....the percentage of Muslims in the areas constituting Pakistan rose from 77% in 1941 to 83% in 1949".

In other words, the population of minorities, mostly Hindus, was 17% in 1949 in Pakistan. This included both east and west Pakistan. Let's examine what has happened to the minority population in Pakistan since 1971 when East Pakistan split off to form Bangladesh. More specifically, let's focus on the Hindu population that constitutes overwhelming majority of religious minorities population.

Hindu population of the areas that now constitute post-1971 Pakistan was 15% in 1931 India Census. It declined to 14% in 1941. Then first Pakistan Census in 1951 showed it was 1.3% after the massive cross-border migration of both Hindus and Muslims in 1947. During the partition, 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs migrated to India from what became Pakistan, while over 8 million Muslims migrated from India to Pakistan. Since 1951, the Hindu population of what is now Pakistan has grown from 1.3% to 1.9% now.

Pew Research reported in 2017 that nearly half of India’s migrants are in just three countries: the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and the United States. About 3.5 million Indians live in the UAE, the top destination country for Indian migrants. Over the past two decades, millions of Indians have migrated there to find employment as laborers. Pakistan has the second-largest number of Indian-born migrants, with 2 million who, according to the World Bank, send nearly $5 billion a year in remittances to their poor Muslim relatives in India.

The biggest exodus of Muslims from India was from the Indian Punjab where the Muslim population declined from 32% in 1941 to 0.8% in 1951.

Source: Hindustan Times


Muslims in Indian Punjab. Indian Census Data

Contrary to the sensational media headlines about declining Hindu population in Pakistan, the fact is that Hindu birth rate is significantly higher than the country's national average. Although Hindus make up only 1.9% of Pakistan's population, it is among the worlds fastest growing Hindu communities today, growing faster than the Hindu populations in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Indonesia.




Hindu Population in West Pakistan Source: Census Data

`Pakistan Census data. For 1931 and 1941, the figures are for West Pakistan in undivided India. For 1951 and 1961, the figures are for West Pakistan in undivided Pakistan. Data for 1971 could not be accessed.

Hindu population of the areas that now constitute Pakistan was 15% in 1931 India Census. It declined to 14% in 1941 India Census. Then first Pakistan Census in 1951 showed it was 1.3% after the massive cross-border migration of both Hindus and Muslims in 1947. During the partition, 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs migrated to India from what became Pakistan, while over 8 million Muslims migrated from India to Pakistan. Since 1951, the Hindu population of what is now Pakistan has grown from 1.3% to 1.9% now.





Top Countries With Hindu Populations Source: Pew Research Center

Fastest Growing Religions By Countries

Sindhi Hindu Woman





Hindu fertility rate (TFR) of 3.2 children per woman in Pakistan is much higher than national fertility rate of 2.86. With 3.33 million Hindus, Pakistan is currently home to the world's 5th largest Hindu population. By 2050, Pakistan will rank 4th with 5.6 million Hindus, surpassing Indonesia which is currently ranked 4th largest Hindu country, according to Pew Research.

While it is true that some Pakistani Hindus have been targets of religious bigotry and intolerance by some extremists in the majority Muslim community, there are also many many examples of mutual tolerance and respect between Hindus and Muslims in the country. In the city of Mithi in Sindh's Tharparkar district, for example, Muslims do not slaughter cows out of respect for their fellow citizens of Hindu faith, and Hindus, out of respect for Muslim rites do not have marriage celebrations during the month of Muharram. Hassan Raza, a student journalist, quoted a resident of a village near Mithi as saying:

"In our village, Hindus and Muslims have been living together for decades and there has not been a single day, when I have seen a religious conflict. No loud speaker is used for Azaan at the time when Hindus are worshiping in their temple, and no bells are rung when it is time for namaz. Nobody eats in public when it is Ramazan and Holi is played by every member of the village."



Diwali Celebration in Mithi, Pakistan

Another example is Rohiri in Sindh where a visiting Canadian-Indian Hindu diplomat saw a thriving Hindu community. Here's an except of how he describes his visit to Rohiri:

"One of the most interesting elements of the trip was visiting my father’s town, Rohiri, his birthplace. I found there was still a sizeable Hindu community there. That totally took me by surprise. We still think there was a massive religious cleansing in Pakistan and there were no Hindus left. Then I came across this family of shopkeepers who said, “Don’t worry about anything. Stay with us.” They gave me lunch and dinner and put me on the night train to Lahore. Talking to this family in the neighbourhood where my father grew up and was married was fascinating. The question that came to mind was why did my father’s family leave Pakistan and why are these people still here? Official figures suggest 14 million people were displaced after partition and that half a million to a million people were killed. And yet 60 years later these Hindu people in Rohiri are still there. They felt connected to the place where they were born. In the three towns I passed through I kept meeting Hindus — traders, professionals. Their numbers were small, 300 or 400 families in each of these towns. They have their own places of worship. I dared to ask: “Are you happy here?” and they said, “Yes, this is the land where we were born.”"


Pakistani Fashion Designer Deepak Perwani in Karachi


A successful Karachi-based Hindu Pakistani fashion designer Deepak Perwani said the following while talking to Indian media in 2012:

"People keep asking me, 'Oh you guys didn't migrate?', 'How are you treated there?' and so on. The questions show a lack of awareness." Perwani is part of Karachi's flourishing Hindu community, which is small but visible and influential even today. One lakh of Karachi's 1.3 crore population is Hindu.

As Perwani puts it, a lot of what people say about Pakistani Hindus shows "a lack of awareness".

Another musing of the blog writer being used by the blog writer to buff up own contentions not concerned with Pakistani Defence as the site is about.

Using your own source of Pew:


Hindu Today, Muslim Tomorrow

Saba Imtiaz ("The Atlantic," August 14, 2017)

For the first 16 years of her life, Ravita Meghwar was a Hindu girl living in a village in Pakistan. But today her name is Gulnaz Shah, and she is married, and a Muslim. Her family members believe that kidnappers drugged them and abducted their daughter, and that she was forcibly converted to Islam. She says she eloped and married of her own choice.

A decade or two ago, Meghwar’s case would have gone unreported. But in recent years, case after case involving Hindu girls converting to Islam have emerged in courts in Pakistan’s southeastern Sindh province, home to the majority of the country’s Hindus. The allegedly forcible nature of the conversions, the almost identical pattern of the cases, and the targeting of minor girls have deeply unsettled the Hindu population, which constitutes about 2 percent of Pakistan’s approximately 200 million people. This sense of alarm feeds into a broader reckoning: 70 years after the partition of the Indian subcontinent, some Hindus are reassessing their place in Pakistan.

While Pakistan was created as a Muslim state in 1947, the country’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, said that religious minorities should have the freedom to live there and practice their faith. But today Pakistan’s identity is that of an Islamic nationalist state, hardline religious groups are a formidable force, and religious minorities have little voice in society. As influential Islamic shrines and religious groups work to convert people to Islam, some Hindus are leaving their villages and moving to cities in Pakistan, or leaving Pakistan altogether and moving to India.

Cases of forced conversion are mostly reported from the Sindh province, as Meghwar’s was this year. Although Pakistan became a Muslim-majority state post-partition—with Muslims dominating politics, the economy, and society—Hindus managed to retain a degree of social influence in the Sindh province, where they were known as successful merchants. According to the most recent available census, more than 6 percent of Sindh’s population is Hindu.

But lower-caste and low-income Hindus in Sindh toil on farmlands for powerful, rich landowners, sometimes in a form of economic servitude. They face social discrimination and are often cut off from the Hindu community at large. A 2015 report by the South Asia Partnership-Pakistan argued that social, cultural, economic, and religious factors have combined with feudal power structures in rural areas to enable forcible conversions.

Lajpat Meghwadh, Ravita Meghwar’s brother-in-law, believes she was targeted because her family was part of a larger political dispute in their village over the use of a well. “The person who Ravita has gone off with has no connection to the family, except that they had a dispute. He has never come to our house,” he said.

While Hindu activists and families allege that young girls are abducted, coerced into converting to Islam, and married off to Muslim men in an organized manner, Muslim religious activists and leaders are defensive about conversions, believing that converting someone to Islam is a way of earning blessings. These conversions are often backed by powerful shrines, seminaries, and clerics, as well as local politicians. Seminaries and shrines protect the couple and say the girl willingly eloped, converted, and married.

This poses a challenge for lawyers and activists, who have to figure out if these marriages are born of free will or are marked by threats and violence. And almost invariably, the girl’s testimony that she exercised her right as an adult to marry settles the case, while her parents continue to insist she is being pressured by the influential followers of the shrine where she converted to Islam.

Forced conversions became a national talking point in 2012, when three Hindu girls were reported to have been forcibly converted to Islam and married to Muslim men. The cases went to Pakistan’s Supreme Court. One of them involved a girl called Rinkle Kumari, whose conversion took place at a shrine associated with a legislator who was then part of the Pakistan Peoples Party, which governed the country at the time.

In court, the women said they wanted to live with their husbands, though activist Mangla Sharma, a member of the Pakistan Hindu Council, told me Kumari wanted to go back to her parents. The court said the women were free to be with their Muslim husbands.

“I went with Rinkle all the way to the Supreme Court,” Sharma said. “And I was very disappointed for a long time, that nothing can happen. … After Rinkle’s case, there was a sense of disappointment in the community. A lot of people were thinking about migrating at that time. Of course, some people have government jobs and can’t leave. Or there are people like me who think that there are just a few people left to raise a voice. If we leave, then what will happen to those who can’t protest?”

After Kumari’s case and a wave of activism around conversions, the Sindh legislature passed a bill in 2016 outlawing forcible conversions and conversions before the age of 18. (so conversion after 18 against will is okay?) The landmark legislation faced instant criticism from hardline religious groups—including Jamaat-ud-Dawa, widely believed to be the public face of the militant network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is accused of carrying out the 2008 attacks on landmarks in Mumbai. Right-wing groups banded together to form an opposition movement. In a statement at the time, Muzammil Iqbal Hashmi, then-head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa in Karachi, said, “It is not even conceivable to think of impediments to entering the fold of Islam.” The outcry led to the Sindh governor declining to sign the bill into law. Farooq Azam, a spokesperson for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, told me their opposition was to the entire legislation, and that the conditions it sought to establish were unacceptable.

“What we’re really fighting against is the mindset,” Sharma, the member of the Pakistan Hindu Council, said. “You don’t give a minor any other rights—yet you give a minor the right to suddenly change their life. When there were reservations [about the law] from religious elements, they said ‘There is no age in our religion to convert.’ My technical point is: There isn’t any age in your religion, in your law, but that doesn’t apply to our kids. We’re making this law for our children.”

In the absence of a law explicitly banning forced conversions, activists and lawyers are zeroing in on the cases of minor girls, using a different law that outlaws all marriage in Sindh below the age of 18. In the case of Meghwar, for example, Ali Palh, a lawyer associated with the Sindh Human Rights Defenders Network, intervened on the grounds that her elopement violated the law on underage marriage. “The girl is underage and can’t make up her own mind,” Palh said.

But a high court judge ruled that Meghwar could live with her husband. Judges, Palh told me, don’t look at the implicit compulsion at play in a case of a forced conversion that leads to a marriage.

Young girls aren’t the only ones being targeted for conversion. Mass conversions of Hindu families are taking place in Sindh, and many are reported to be lower-caste Hindus. Seminaries and clerics offer money and housing to new Muslim converts; they issue press releases when they convert someone to Islam, believing this to be a considerable achievement.

It’s unclear how and when forced conversions became such an organized movement. Most activists say this change took place over the past 15 years. They point to the enduring legacy of former president General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime in the 1970s and 1980s. The Haq government sought to make sharia the supreme law of Pakistan in an effort to Islamicize the country.

Now, the spate of conversions to Islam is changing the way Hindus live in a province that has been their home for generations. Lajpat Meghwadh said that Hindu families, including his in-laws, are leaving their villages for other cities in Sindh. Accurate counts of the Hindus leaving their villages are difficult to come by; there is only anecdotal evidence. As for Hindus leaving Pakistan altogether and migrating to India, one estimate put the number at 5,000 per year.

In Karachi, the capital of the Sindh province, stories of conversions and abductions routinely make the rounds among Hindus. Vijay Kumar, a former sailor, 36, lounged outside the Sri Laxmi Narayan temple with his family, pointing out his wizened grandmother, who used to travel between what is now Pakistan and India—“without a train ticket!”—before partition. He told me he had heard of hundreds of Hindu families that had migrated. “There were maybe a dozen-odd families of Hindu traders who had businesses in Sindh that used to live in my neighborhood,” Kumar said. “After these incidents started, there are now entire apartment buildings [in Karachi] filled with these families from [elsewhere within] Sindh.”

“The sense of antagonism between Hindus and Muslims has increased in the last 10 or 15 years,” said Maanjeet Chanderpaul, a retiree who lives on the grounds of the same temple. He said that people often tell him, “Well, look at what happens in your country.” They don’t mean Pakistan—Chanderpaul’s country—but India. As a Hindu, Chanderpaul is often construed as being Indian, even though Karachi has always been his home.

Sharma, for her part, says that while she studied Islam at school, she now fears that if her kids show any interest in Islam they’ll be targets for people looking to earn blessings by converting a Hindu. She routinely cautions her children that they may have close friendships with Muslims but that they could be susceptible to people looking to convert them. As a result of these tensions, she laments, there is distance instead of interfaith harmony.

Sharma and other activists I’ve spoken to believe that at the very least, the government realizes that forced conversions are a problem, but that it lacks the political will to tackle it and the ability to withstand the religious right wing’s pressure.

“Sometimes people ask me ‘Are you Pakistani?’” Sharma said. “I say ‘I’m a pure Pakistani.’ We’re those people that when we had an option, we didn’t go—we preferred to stay here.” She still plans to stick around: “We live here by choice,” she told me. But she added that had her elders known, back when they decided to stay in Pakistan, what today’s generation would have to face, perhaps they wouldn’t have made that choice.


source: https://wwrn.org/articles/47239/ from http://www.globalreligiousfutures.org/countries/pakistan/religion_news (a Pew undertaking)


@RiazHaq Your concern for Indian societal regressions is touching!

Using your Pew resources, interesting reads as under:


Pakistan: Christian, Hindu Girls Become Target of Sunni Muslim Clerics

source: https://wwrn.org/articles/47357/

We, in India have a problem. But so do you. We acknowledge and publicize our shame and our failure to protect our women, you merely exemplify India's problems to tide over yours

Religion, 'honor' and Pakistan's 'revenge rape'

https://wwrn.org/articles/47169/

Another Member of Minority Religious Sect Slain in Pakistan

etc etc ......

Anyways, carry on.... whatever helps you sleep at night

 

[GHALIB]

Another musing of the blog writer being used by the blog writer to buff up own contentions not concerned with Pakistani Defence as the site is about.

Using your own source of Pew:


Hindu Today, Muslim Tomorrow

Saba Imtiaz ("The Atlantic," August 14, 2017)

For the first 16 years of her life, Ravita Meghwar was a Hindu girl living in a village in Pakistan. But today her name is Gulnaz Shah, and she is married, and a Muslim. Her family members believe that kidnappers drugged them and abducted their daughter, and that she was forcibly converted to Islam. She says she eloped and married of her own choice.

A decade or two ago, Meghwar’s case would have gone unreported. But in recent years, case after case involving Hindu girls converting to Islam have emerged in courts in Pakistan’s southeastern Sindh province, home to the majority of the country’s Hindus. The allegedly forcible nature of the conversions, the almost identical pattern of the cases, and the targeting of minor girls have deeply unsettled the Hindu population, which constitutes about 2 percent of Pakistan’s approximately 200 million people. This sense of alarm feeds into a broader reckoning: 70 years after the partition of the Indian subcontinent, some Hindus are reassessing their place in Pakistan.

While Pakistan was created as a Muslim state in 1947, the country’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, said that religious minorities should have the freedom to live there and practice their faith. But today Pakistan’s identity is that of an Islamic nationalist state, hardline religious groups are a formidable force, and religious minorities have little voice in society. As influential Islamic shrines and religious groups work to convert people to Islam, some Hindus are leaving their villages and moving to cities in Pakistan, or leaving Pakistan altogether and moving to India.

Cases of forced conversion are mostly reported from the Sindh province, as Meghwar’s was this year. Although Pakistan became a Muslim-majority state post-partition—with Muslims dominating politics, the economy, and society—Hindus managed to retain a degree of social influence in the Sindh province, where they were known as successful merchants. According to the most recent available census, more than 6 percent of Sindh’s population is Hindu.

But lower-caste and low-income Hindus in Sindh toil on farmlands for powerful, rich landowners, sometimes in a form of economic servitude. They face social discrimination and are often cut off from the Hindu community at large. A 2015 report by the South Asia Partnership-Pakistan argued that social, cultural, economic, and religious factors have combined with feudal power structures in rural areas to enable forcible conversions.

Lajpat Meghwadh, Ravita Meghwar’s brother-in-law, believes she was targeted because her family was part of a larger political dispute in their village over the use of a well. “The person who Ravita has gone off with has no connection to the family, except that they had a dispute. He has never come to our house,” he said.

While Hindu activists and families allege that young girls are abducted, coerced into converting to Islam, and married off to Muslim men in an organized manner, Muslim religious activists and leaders are defensive about conversions, believing that converting someone to Islam is a way of earning blessings. These conversions are often backed by powerful shrines, seminaries, and clerics, as well as local politicians. Seminaries and shrines protect the couple and say the girl willingly eloped, converted, and married.

This poses a challenge for lawyers and activists, who have to figure out if these marriages are born of free will or are marked by threats and violence. And almost invariably, the girl’s testimony that she exercised her right as an adult to marry settles the case, while her parents continue to insist she is being pressured by the influential followers of the shrine where she converted to Islam.

Forced conversions became a national talking point in 2012, when three Hindu girls were reported to have been forcibly converted to Islam and married to Muslim men. The cases went to Pakistan’s Supreme Court. One of them involved a girl called Rinkle Kumari, whose conversion took place at a shrine associated with a legislator who was then part of the Pakistan Peoples Party, which governed the country at the time.

In court, the women said they wanted to live with their husbands, though activist Mangla Sharma, a member of the Pakistan Hindu Council, told me Kumari wanted to go back to her parents. The court said the women were free to be with their Muslim husbands.

“I went with Rinkle all the way to the Supreme Court,” Sharma said. “And I was very disappointed for a long time, that nothing can happen. … After Rinkle’s case, there was a sense of disappointment in the community. A lot of people were thinking about migrating at that time. Of course, some people have government jobs and can’t leave. Or there are people like me who think that there are just a few people left to raise a voice. If we leave, then what will happen to those who can’t protest?”

After Kumari’s case and a wave of activism around conversions, the Sindh legislature passed a bill in 2016 outlawing forcible conversions and conversions before the age of 18. (so conversion after 18 against will is okay?) The landmark legislation faced instant criticism from hardline religious groups—including Jamaat-ud-Dawa, widely believed to be the public face of the militant network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is accused of carrying out the 2008 attacks on landmarks in Mumbai. Right-wing groups banded together to form an opposition movement. In a statement at the time, Muzammil Iqbal Hashmi, then-head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa in Karachi, said, “It is not even conceivable to think of impediments to entering the fold of Islam.” The outcry led to the Sindh governor declining to sign the bill into law. Farooq Azam, a spokesperson for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, told me their opposition was to the entire legislation, and that the conditions it sought to establish were unacceptable.

“What we’re really fighting against is the mindset,” Sharma, the member of the Pakistan Hindu Council, said. “You don’t give a minor any other rights—yet you give a minor the right to suddenly change their life. When there were reservations [about the law] from religious elements, they said ‘There is no age in our religion to convert.’ My technical point is: There isn’t any age in your religion, in your law, but that doesn’t apply to our kids. We’re making this law for our children.”

In the absence of a law explicitly banning forced conversions, activists and lawyers are zeroing in on the cases of minor girls, using a different law that outlaws all marriage in Sindh below the age of 18. In the case of Meghwar, for example, Ali Palh, a lawyer associated with the Sindh Human Rights Defenders Network, intervened on the grounds that her elopement violated the law on underage marriage. “The girl is underage and can’t make up her own mind,” Palh said.

But a high court judge ruled that Meghwar could live with her husband. Judges, Palh told me, don’t look at the implicit compulsion at play in a case of a forced conversion that leads to a marriage.

Young girls aren’t the only ones being targeted for conversion. Mass conversions of Hindu families are taking place in Sindh, and many are reported to be lower-caste Hindus. Seminaries and clerics offer money and housing to new Muslim converts; they issue press releases when they convert someone to Islam, believing this to be a considerable achievement.

It’s unclear how and when forced conversions became such an organized movement. Most activists say this change took place over the past 15 years. They point to the enduring legacy of former president General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime in the 1970s and 1980s. The Haq government sought to make sharia the supreme law of Pakistan in an effort to Islamicize the country.

Now, the spate of conversions to Islam is changing the way Hindus live in a province that has been their home for generations. Lajpat Meghwadh said that Hindu families, including his in-laws, are leaving their villages for other cities in Sindh. Accurate counts of the Hindus leaving their villages are difficult to come by; there is only anecdotal evidence. As for Hindus leaving Pakistan altogether and migrating to India, one estimate put the number at 5,000 per year.

In Karachi, the capital of the Sindh province, stories of conversions and abductions routinely make the rounds among Hindus. Vijay Kumar, a former sailor, 36, lounged outside the Sri Laxmi Narayan temple with his family, pointing out his wizened grandmother, who used to travel between what is now Pakistan and India—“without a train ticket!”—before partition. He told me he had heard of hundreds of Hindu families that had migrated. “There were maybe a dozen-odd families of Hindu traders who had businesses in Sindh that used to live in my neighborhood,” Kumar said. “After these incidents started, there are now entire apartment buildings [in Karachi] filled with these families from [elsewhere within] Sindh.”

“The sense of antagonism between Hindus and Muslims has increased in the last 10 or 15 years,” said Maanjeet Chanderpaul, a retiree who lives on the grounds of the same temple. He said that people often tell him, “Well, look at what happens in your country.” They don’t mean Pakistan—Chanderpaul’s country—but India. As a Hindu, Chanderpaul is often construed as being Indian, even though Karachi has always been his home.

Sharma, for her part, says that while she studied Islam at school, she now fears that if her kids show any interest in Islam they’ll be targets for people looking to earn blessings by converting a Hindu. She routinely cautions her children that they may have close friendships with Muslims but that they could be susceptible to people looking to convert them. As a result of these tensions, she laments, there is distance instead of interfaith harmony.

Sharma and other activists I’ve spoken to believe that at the very least, the government realizes that forced conversions are a problem, but that it lacks the political will to tackle it and the ability to withstand the religious right wing’s pressure.

“Sometimes people ask me ‘Are you Pakistani?’” Sharma said. “I say ‘I’m a pure Pakistani.’ We’re those people that when we had an option, we didn’t go—we preferred to stay here.” She still plans to stick around: “We live here by choice,” she told me. But she added that had her elders known, back when they decided to stay in Pakistan, what today’s generation would have to face, perhaps they wouldn’t have made that choice.


source: https://wwrn.org/articles/47239/ from http://www.globalreligiousfutures.org/countries/pakistan/religion_news (a Pew undertaking)


@RiazHaq Your concern for Indian societal regressions is touching!

Riaz haq is concerned with letting down india by his special statistical mthods, his professional failure at intel in front of indian engineers is cause of his utter frustration with india .

 

[Hellfire]

Riaz haq is concerned with letting down india by his special statistical mthods, his professional failure at intel in front of indian engineers is cause of his utter frustration with india .

The only thing that comes to fore after going through the member's attempts here, is someone who is well read in the art of using the resources available to make targeted editorials.

One can not deny the brilliance of each piece and one must surely commend him for trying to give a spin to a nation where the Government has surrendered it's authority in front of TLP two times already, reminding me of the 1960s when Bengalis were being politically marginalised in 'the land of the pure'.

When your own nation is suffering, how better to divert the attention from own issues which have no answers, than by focusing on data meant to shed a poor light on a nation with which the struggle is maintained just to justify own existence?

There's no mystery. Refugees flee for their lives to the closest country.

Turkey is the largest and Pakistan is the second largest host country for refugees worldwide. Turkey has nearly 3.5 million refugees mostly from Syria.

And there is no mystery as to why too, isn't it?

And Pakistan gets away shoveling dirt displaying these figures too!

Pakistan has 1.4 million refugees mainly of Afghan origin. Germany is the only western country that shows up among the top 10 host countries for refugees. Most of the rest are Muslim majority countries.

And what are the analysis for that?

indian hindus are leaning towards extreme hindutwa because of terrorists attacking india, otherwise indian society was secular for the last 70 years.

No, they are leaning towards Hindutva as defined by the media and the politicians (Congress et al) because of the policy followed by the very same, of painting everything in terms of religion to try and buttress secular credentials, has created a reactive generation tired of being told that they have to apologize for being the majority religion. Simple as that.

With the education standards that we have, and average national IQ of 82, not hard to guess what was to happen, was it? Who introduced Secular word into the Preamble to the Constitution of India? And guess what, who introduced the politics of religion both in Kashmir and Punjab?

Backwardness is because of low education and lack of adoptiveness to modern education , high birth rate, more no of children per family is the root cause of muslims remaining backward. Mullas are also a reason for muslims stay in middle age mindset .

Again, not entirely adequate. Why is the Indian nation refusing to accept the Uniform Civil Code? Because, ignorance remains a bliss and 'vansh ka naam aagey badhega' logic. It is non-sense when someone says only Muslims have many children. True, that sub-group reinforces their stupidity by claiming some bullshit about religion, but also true is that polygamy is not strictly limited to them either. Although incest is very common in them.

And all justified in name of religion.

Most interesting point to observe is that Dalits convert to Christianity to suit their needs, become Dalits again to get reservation benefits and if someone pins them for it, they cry wolf.

True that there is oppression, but that has really got nothing to do with the caste and religion, merely to do with the economic status. Which society does not have exploitation of the masses who are economically not able to compete with the exploiter? (Hint: That is why even the communists have space, Maoists )

 

[Sam.]

Working at home is done by hundreds of millions of women from other groups as well.
It's about education, options and being independent.

You are showing your western values here as where co-dependency is look down upon. Here in India we live in large families.

You talk about education as western education in India Aryabhata didn't go to western schools to learn about mathematics.

Problem is as you described which is "separate identity"

Proudly? I don't think so. They are restricted from pursuing a proper education or a career.

Also, working at home doesn't feed the 7-8 or more mouths on the man's income who himself isn't too well to do because he too came from a similar environment of low development.

She chose her career as a housewife and there is nothing wrong in that. Problem is having 7-8 children so target that.

Again, not entirely adequate. Why is the Indian nation refusing to accept the Uniform Civil Code? Because, ignorance remains a bliss and 'vansh ka naam aagey badhega' logic. It is non-sense when someone says only Muslims have many children. True, that sub-group reinforces their stupidity by claiming some bullshit about religion, but also true is that polygamy is not strictly limited to them either. Although incest is very common in them.

I can attest not only Muslim has but many others are children factory in India.

Also hello Raw agent, you went missing so i thought it was 50 cent army as we didn't get you.

 

[RoadRunner401]

I understand you are trying to promote yourself, but @RiazHaq , answer me this, Why is Indian Muslim Pakistans problem?

 

[pothead]

You are showing your western values here as where co-dependency is look down upon. Here in India we live in large families.

You talk about education as western education in India Aryabhata didn't go to western schools to learn about mathematics.

Problem is as you described which is "separate identity"

Which western values am I showing?

You seem to be having incredible comprehension issues - re read my post again.

I mentioned in the thread that education does not mean a degree.
or are u telling me Indian women did't get education decades back? They got it, like u mentioned, from the parents, aunts, uncles, Grand parents, cousins etc etc.

You seem to be confusing education with degrees.

 

[Sully3]

#ThankYouJinnah

 

[Sam.]

Which western values am I showing?

You seem to be having incredible comprehension issues - re read my post again.

I mentioned in the thread that education does not mean a degree.
or are u telling me Indian women did't get education decades back? They got it, like u mentioned, from the parents, aunts, uncles, Grand parents, cousins etc etc.

You seem to be confusing education with degrees.

I understood it wrong i guess as i am drunk.

I just wish to tell that Muslim women in India are Indians and problem exists in few parts where they think they are Arabs.

It all started with "Whabaism" and petro dollar money to moulvis in mosques.

 

[BATMAN]

Even the movie stars with Muslims names are not spared.
What RAW did to Sania Mirza, upon marrying Shoaib is also a classic.

 

[Suriya]

Even the movie stars with Muslims names are not spared.
What RAW did to Sania Mirza, upon marrying Shoaib is also a classic.

If Hindus were bigots , there would not be any Muslim movie star in India !