LAHORE, Pakistan (RNS) — Sixteen-year-old Suneeta and her 12-year-old sister were walking home in March when they were kidnapped.
The men who took them forced the girls to convert to Islam.
“We were walking back to our house after working on the farm when men in a car came out of nowhere and dragged us in with them,” said Suneeta, who is Hindu and lives in Badin, a small city in the south of Pakistan. “The next thing we knew, we were in a shrine being forced to say the kalma (acceptance of Islam) by a cleric.”
The men who kidnapped the girls told their mother to pay the equivalent of $365 — an enormous amount for the poor farming family — or the men would marry off the girls.
Their mother begged and borrowed from within the Hindu community and paid the ransom. She got her girls back.
The family considers itself lucky.
Every year, thousands of Hindu and Christian girls and young women are kidnapped in Pakistan and forcibly married, disappearing from their families. And while these forced conversions have been going on for decades, a recent surge in reported cases has brought the issue back into the limelight.
Around 1,000 cases of Hindu and Christian girls being forced to convert were estimated in the province of southern Sindh alone in 2018, according to the annual report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
There are no concrete numbers for the rest of…
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