Islamabad: In another attack against the minority Hindu community of Pakistan, an 18-year-old girl, Pooja Oad, was shot dead in the street of the Sindh district after she resisted attempts to abduct her, reported Friday Times. Pooja Oad was shot dead in Rohi, Sukkur after she resisted an abduction attempt.
According to Pakistani reporter and commentator Naila Inayat, it was one Wahid Lashari who tried to abduct Pooja Oad and shot her dead when she resisted the attempt.
According to the People’s Commission for Minorities Rights and the Center for Social Justice, Pooja was first tried to kidnap on the road and when she protested, the assailants shot her in the middle of the street. Every year women belonging to minority communities, especially in Sindh, are abducted and forcibly converted by religious extremists, The Friday Times reported.
It also said that Pakistan’s minority communities have been facing forced marriages and conversions for a long time. There have been many cases of religious conversion and forced marriage in the Sindh province of Pakistan. Once again a similar case has come to the fore where an 18-year-old girl was shot in public.
Hindus, who are a minority in the Islamic nation of Pakistan are regularly targeted with hate, abductions, rapes, forced marriages and murder. According to the Peoples Commission for Minorities’ Rights and the Centre for Social Justice, 156 incidents of forced conversions took place between 2013 and 2019, it said.
In 2019, a bill outlawing forced conversions was introduced, however, due to the influence of Islamists in Pakistan, it was never passed and the minorities still suffer the consequences.
A 2019 field investigation report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has reaffirmed an unpleasant reality that is already known for far too long—minorities in Pakistan live under constant fear of persecution as their perpetrators enjoy court sanctions, support from the influential and affluent section of the society and patronage from political leaders.
The courts in Pakistan have consistently failed in providing justice for Hindus in Pakistan. In fact, in some cases, the courts have empowered the culprits responsible for abducting and forcibly converting the Hindu and Christian minorities. In the case of Reena and Raveena, for example, two underage Hindu girls who disappeared from their homes in Daharki city and were later found to be married to Muslim men after being converted to Islam, the Supreme Court granted only 5 minutes for the mother to meet her daughters. The mother later reportedly said that both her daughters were continuously weeping and looked fearful. Similarly, in June 2020, a district magistrate allowed a Muslim man to keep his Hindu wife even after the parents of the girl alleged that their daughter was kidnapped and forcibly married off to the man.