Ghotki girls not forcibly converted, allowed to live with spouses
islamabad — Two Hindu sisters whose parents said they were kidnapped and forced to change their religion to marry Muslims had converted voluntarily, a court ruled on Thursday.
The Islamabad High Court had earlier ordered the government to take custody of the sisters in late March after accusations spread on social media that they had been forced to convert to Islam.
Another video showed the sisters saying they had married two Muslim men and converted to Islam of their own free will.
The court said the two were adult enough to make their own decisions and that they were not forced to convert, and permitted them to live with their spouses.
Police say the girls left their
home in the southern province of Sindh on March 20 to be married in Punjab province, where the law does not bar marriages of those younger than 18, unlike Sindh.
The police detained 10 people in the case and registered a formal case of kidnapping and robbery on complaints from the girls’ parents.
The sisters and their spouses had petitioned the Islamabad High Court
on March 25 against alleged harassment by police days after their father and brother, in videos, alleged that the two sisters were underage, had been abducted, forced into changing their religion, and then married off to Muslim men.
High Court Chief Justice Athar Minallah had constituted a fivemember commission to probe whether the conversion of the Hindu sisters to Islam was forced or otherwise. During an earlier hearing, the court had also ordered that the two girls be shifted to a shelter home in Islamabad.
Interior Secretary Azam Suleman inforfmed the court about the findings of the commission, and told the court that as per the commission’s opinion, it was a facilitated conversion.
The incident prompted a comment from Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj who said she had asked India’s ambassador in Pakistan for a report.
Pakistan was “totally behind the girls”, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said on social media in response to Swaraj’s message, but asked India to look after its own minority Muslims.