Religious Minorities in Pakistan

rdf:langString Religious Minorities in Pakistan

rdf:langString Pakistan has various religious minorities. According to the 1941 census of India, there were 5.9 million non-Muslims in the territories that came to form Pakistan in 1947 (West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). During and after Pakistan's independence in 1947, about 5 million Hindus and Sikhs emigrated to India, with Punjab alone accounting for migration of 3.9 million people. According to the 1951 census conducted by the Government of Pakistan, Pakistan had 1.6% Hindu population. In East Pakistan(Bangladesh), the non-Muslims comprised 23.2% of the total population. By 1997, the percentage of Hindus remained stable at 1.85% in Pakistan, while Bangladesh has witnessed a decline with Hindus migrating from it because of insecurity due to fear of persecution, conflict, communal violence (as a result of newly created Bangladesh's assertion of its Muslim identity) and poverty. The percentage of Hindus in Bangladesh had dropped to 9.2% by 2011, with non-Muslims accounting for 10.2%of the population. due to disproportionate birth rates between the two communities. Much of the decrease in minorities of Pakistan has occurred due to the events around the partition, the wars of 1965 and 1971. Forced conversions and marriages occur largely in rural and backward areas in Pakistan. November 2019, Pakistan formed parliamentary committee to stop the act of forced conversion in the country. However, according to "[t]he All Pakistan Hindu Panchayat (APHP)...[the] majority of cases of marriages between Hindu women and Muslim men were result of love affairs. It said due to honour, the family members of women concoct stories of abduction and forced conversions". According to the Western religious freedom and human rights monitoring group Global Human Rights Defence, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, and the United States Department of State, religious minorities face severe discrimination in Pakistan. However in recent years, Pakistan has seen development in safeguarding the rights of the minorities. For instance In 2019, Supreme Court of Pakistan gave verdict that Christians would be able to register their marriages with an official marriage certificate. In another case, Pakistan opened the Kartarpur Corridor, allowing Sikh pilgrims from around the world to visit Gurdwara Darbar Sahib, one of the holiest shrines in Sikhism, as a goodwill gesture towards minorities. Similarly, a judge nullified the "free-will" marriage of a Hindu girl, Mehik Kumari, and confirmed that she was underage when she "embraced" Islam and married a Muslim man. Activists had argued that Kumari was abducted and forcibly converted to Islam.