![Pakistanis congregate outside the parliament building in Islamabad July 2. The National Assembly Standing Committee on Law, Justice and Human Rights June 27 decided to approve a draft of the Hindu Marriage Bill 2014 to stop forced marriages. [Ashfaq Yusufzai]](http://centralasiaonline.com/shared/images/2014/07/09/pakconversion.jpg)
PESHAWAR – The prospect of forced marriages of kidnapped Hindu girls is on the radar of Pakistani lawmakers.
Now the government is taking measures to protect young Hindu girls against forced marriages.
The National Assembly (NA)’s Standing Committee on Law, Justice and Human Rights June 27 approved a draft law of the Hindu Marriage Bill 2014, which is meant to end the practice.
Ending forced ‘conversions’
Forced marriages have been a problem, especially in Sindh, where 96% of the country’s 7m Hindus reside, Rameesh Kumar, a lawmaker holding one of the parliamentary seats set aside for minorities, told Central Asia Online.
About 1,000 of the so-called conversions take place in Sindh every year, he said.
“Girls are abducted, and their parents receive a phone call after 15 to 30 days, telling them that their girls married Muslim men and converted to Islam,” Kumar said.
“Hindus did nothing to prevent the forced conversions because they feared extremists would retaliate,” Kumar said, adding that fanatics sometimes lurk outside courts and react violently when the courts rule against their wishes.
Hindu input on draft bill
Lawmakers consulted the Hindu community and the Council of Islamic Ideology while drafting the bill, National Assembly member and committee chairman Chaudhry Mahmood Bashir Virk said.
The bill includes passages to bar Muslim men from “marrying” already-wed Hindu women, and sets the minimum age for Hindu girls to marry at 18, Federal Minister for Religious Affairs and Inter-faith Harmony Sardar Muhammad Yousaf said.
“It also recommends that the National Database and Registration Authority [NADRA] issue computerised marriage registration certificates to Hindu couples,” Kumar said, noting that he expects the NA to pass the draft within a month.
Some quarters oppose the bill, saying the 18th constitutional amendment made marriage a provincial matter.
“However, we are committed to pass it through provincial assemblies,” Yousaf said of the bill.
Protecting religious minorities
The bill is part of a broader effort to bring Hindus and other ethnic and religious minorities into the mainstream, the federal minister said.
The federal government has also said it would increase from 2% to 5% the number of jobs it sets aside for Hindu civil servants in an effort to provide them with better opportunities for development, he said.
Islamabad also has asked the provinces to allow Christians to operate their own schools and colleges, he added.
“We’ve appealed to the central government to let Hindus and Christians construct their own places of worship and to end its ban [since 1991] on building churches and temples,” Khyber Pakhtunkhwa parliamentarian Fredrick Azeem said. “The population of minorities has increased, and they need more places of worship.”