Invisible Victims: The Silent Suffering of Minor Girls of Religious Minorities in Pakistan

By Vinay Nalwa

The cries of a father outside a police station in Sindh capture the tragedy of an entire community:“How can my 14-year-old daughter choose to marry a man twice her age, already with two wives and children? She is just a child.”

Yet his words went unheard. The police ignored his complaint. The papers stamped by officials declared that the girl had “embraced Islam” and “married of her free will.” Her father could only look at the empty bed in his home and ask: “How can a child’s stolen childhood be called consent?”

A legacy of Betrayal

The Partition of 1947 marked one of the darkest chapters of South Asian history, where nearly 75,000 women, predominantly Hindu and Sikh, were abducted, raped, and forced into conversion and marriage (Butalia, 1998; Menon & Bhasin, 1998). For Hindu families who remained in Pakistan, that tragedy was not the end but the beginning of a systematic pattern of persecution. What started with mass-scale abductions in 1947 was soon institutionalized into Pakistan’s laws, courts, and governance turning Hindu, Sikh, Christian women and girls into the most vulnerable victims of religious domination.

Pakistan’s Constitution entrenches this bias. Its Preamble declares that “sovereignty… belongs to Almighty Allah alone,” reducing non-Muslims to second-class citizens. Rights promised to minorities exist only “as enunciated by Islam,” ensuring that any protection is conditional. This doctrinal discrimination filters into laws on marriage, conversion, and custody, leaving Hindu, Sikh and Christian girls without recourse when abducted and forced to convert. Courts frequently accept coerced “consent statements” from minors, while police refuse to register FIRs or shield perpetrators under the guise of voluntary conversions.

The Faces behind the Numbers

Reports from the Voice of Pakistan Minority (2024) reveal that in the last four years alone, over 4,200 Hindu and Christian minor girls have vanished into this cycle of abduction and forced conversion. The girls between 10 and 16, the age when they should have been playing, studying, and dreaming. Instead, their parents now sit with framed photographs, wondering if they will ever see their daughters again. Sindh alone accounted for nearly 850 cases in 2024, largely targeting Hindu girls through shrine-linked conversions. Punjab saw about 250 cases, mostly affecting Christian girls in urban areas like Lahore and Faisalabad. Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa together accounted for around 100 cases, though under-reporting is common due to their remoteness.

Behind every statistic is a parent staring at an empty bed each night.

Documented victims include 12-year-old Sridevi, abducted from Larkana and forcibly married, 14-year-old Neena from Mirpurkhas, kidnapped and married to her abductor, and 17-year-old Priya from Hyderabad, raped and murdered under the guise of “suicide.” Many never return home, and some like 13-year-old Nisha Kolhi, are brutally killed after sexual assault. A 10 year old minor Hindu girl Divya Meghwar, of Mirpurkhas was forcibly converted at Sirhandi Pir Samaro, Kot Ghulam Muhammad. Torn from her family, her childhood stolen under coercion. Her plight reflects the brutal reality faced by many Hindu minors in Pakistan, where innocence is sacrificed to intolerance.

Forced conversions are not isolated crimes, they are part of a systemic pattern of persecution. Local clerics, feudal lords, and political actors facilitate the conversions, while law enforcement and judiciary provide impunity. 

The law that should protect these girls instead abandons them.

In cases of abduction and forced conversion of Hindu girls, courts in Pakistan often rely on fragile procedures, such as hurriedly recorded “consent” statements while postponing final custody decisions pending medical age reports or inquiries. These gaps leave space for intimidation and coercion. Occasionally, courts have acted decisively, but such instances remain exceptions rather than the rule. Fieldwork by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) in Ghotki highlights how systemic cracks allow forced conversions to persist.

Women and girls from religious minorities, in particular, Hindu girls in Sindh, remain vulnerable to forced conversion and marriage. According to the Centre for Social Justice, in 2023, there were at least 136 cases of abduction and forced conversions across Pakistan, with 75% under the age of 18. There were at least 78 cases in 2021 and 124 in 2022, showing a rising trend. Despite this rise, in 2021, the Prohibition of Forced Conversion Act 2021 was rejected by the “Parliamentary Committee to Protect Minorities from Forced Conversions”.

In July 2025, three minor Hindu girls were abducted in Sanghar, Sindh, then forcibly converted and married to Muslim men. Their families’ protests led to a Sindh High Court appearance, where the girls appeared accompanied by their husbands’ raising concerns about coercion.

Another shocking case in Shahdadpur, Sindh, saw four Hindu children abducted, two adults and two minors who were swiftly "converted." Courts returned the minors with claims of voluntary embrace, while the adults were placed in a shelter. Observers noted likely duress and media narratives sanitizing the act as consensual. 

For these families, every knock at the door carries the fear that a daughter might be lost forever. The same patterns of coercion, manipulation, and silence that scarred the Partition era continue today, leaving Hindu minorities in Pakistan trapped in a cycle of fear.

Despite occasional reports and condemnations, the persecution of Hindus in Pakistan has received little more than symbolic global attention. Human Rights Watch, and UN Special Rapporteurs have documented the abduction and forced conversion of Hindu girls, while the U.S. State Department, USCIRF, and the European Parliament have raised concerns in official reports and resolutions. UK parliamentary groups and Hindu diaspora organizations have also lobbied persistently. Yet, beyond statements, no binding action has been taken, and Pakistan routinely dismisses such criticism as foreign interference. The silence of the international community leaves Pakistan’s Hindu minority with little recourse—an indifference chillingly reminiscent of the world’s apathy during the horrors of Partition in 1947 and the targeted killings in Bangladesh in 1971.

Despite international conventions on child rights and religious freedom, little sustained pressure has been placed on Pakistan. The result is a culture where perpetrators are celebrated as heroes while victims’ families live in fear or flee the country altogether.

Today, the suffering of minor girls of Hindus and other religious minorities in Pakistan is not just about individual cases, it is the continuation of Partition’s legacy of sexual violence, forced assimilation, and erasure. Until Pakistan confronts the discriminatory foundations of its Constitution and enacts binding protections, girls of religious minorities will remain invisible victims of a state system that denies them justice, dignity, and freedom.

On 14 August, as Pakistan hoisted its flag to mark Independence Day, somewhere in Sindh a Hindu father sat outside a police station, pleading for the return of his 13-year-old daughter. True freedom begins with the right of every child to remain with her family…

(The writer is an author and columnist)

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