RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Texas House of Representatives passed a resolution on March 28, officially recognizing March 23 as “Pakistan Day.” The resolution, introduced by State Representative Dr. Suleman Lalani, claims that Pakistani Texans have made “significant contributions in the state’s social, religious, linguistic, and economic spheres.” Pakistan’s Consul General in Texas, Muhammad Aftab Chaudhry, was present at the event.

The problem is that at the same time as Texas was celebrating “Pakistan Day”, in Pakistan, Christian citizens were being arrested and sentenced to death for “blasphemy,” and Muslims were abducting young Christian girls to sexually abuse, forcibly “marry,” and coerce into converting to Islam.

Pakistan’s national and provincial parliaments have given their consent to these atrocities. In 2019, the Sindh Provincial Assembly rejected a bill criminalizing forced religious conversions. This was the second attempt at enacting a law against forced conversion in the province. In 2016, the Assembly had passed a similar bill, but the governor did not agree to it.

In 2021, a committee in Pakistan’s National Assembly rejected a bill against forced conversion after the Ministry of Religious Affairs opposed the proposed law.

Christians, Hindus and other non-Muslim communities in Pakistan have been enduring increased levels of violence and persecution.

On March 25, Muslim gunmen attacked 34-year-old Adnan Masih and his wife in Faisalabad District, robbing them at gunpoint. According to Masih:

“When I told them that I was a poor Christian and an ordinary worker at a brick kiln, they started whispering something into each other’s ears… One of them grabbed my wife’s arm and pulled her into a nearby sugarcane field… and took turns raping my wife.”

On March 21, a Muslim in Punjab Province, Zohaib Iftikhar, slashed the throat of a Christian co-worker, Waqas Masih, on allegations that he had committed blasphemy by touching an Islamic textbook “with unclean hands.”

On March 20, police arrested a social media influencer on allegations of blasphemy from the country’s Muzaffargarh District. A complaint was filed against the woman for “posting derogatory remarks.”

“Police registered a case against the TikToker under Sections 295-A (Deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs) and 298-A (Uttering words with deliberate intent to wound religious feelings) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC). She was later arrested… and she was sent to jail on judicial remand…”

On March 17, Federal Investigation Agency officials arrested 24-year-old Arsalan Gill, a Christian, “under a blasphemy law mandating the death penalty in relation to material that appeared on Facebook groups without his knowledge.”

“The impoverished Catholic family was shocked when an FIA official told them late that night that their son was arrested and charged with sharing blasphemous content on Facebook groups. The FIA officials did not let them meet with him that night…”

These are not isolated cases. Under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam, its prophet or other religious figures can be imprisoned and sentenced to death.

In January, a Pakistani court sentenced four Pakistanis to death for “posting sacrilegious material on social media about Islamic religious figures and the Quran.”

“Along with the death sentences, the judge imposed collective fines of 4.6 million rupees (around $16,500) and handed down jail terms to each of the four should a higher court overturn their death sentences.”

While all women in Pakistan are vulnerable to gender-based violence, those from religious minorities face particularly violent gender-specific abuse. Every year, according to the Movement for Solidarity and Peace, up to a thousand Christian and Hindu girls and young women are abducted by Muslim men.

These girls — as young as 7, primarily from poor families and including girls with physical disabilities — are forcibly married, sexually assaulted and compelled to convert to Islam on pain of death. Many families never see them again, and the police and state authorities rarely take any action to recover the girls or bring perpetrators to justice. The police are often biased and refuse to file reports from Christians and Hindus.

The Texas House of Representatives might instead have dedicated March 23 to Pakistan’s abduction victims and abused children.

The Jubilee Campaign reported in a 2023 written statement to the UN Human Rights Council that “the victim girls are forcibly married to men who are twice their age or more and who are already married with children near the victims’ age.”

Open Doors, a human rights organization that monitors the persecution of Christians on a global scale, ranks Pakistan number eight in its World Watch List:

“The legal system repeatedly fails these young women. The psychological trauma and abuse continue even if a case is brought to bring back the girl. Many of them are forced to say they’re over 18 years old or that they converted voluntarily.”

A 10-year-old girl from Faisalabad was kidnapped and forcibly converted on February 12, 2024. Other recent instances include a 13-year-old girl who was kidnapped on March 13, 2024, and a 15-year-old girl from Sindh Province who was abducted on March 11, 2024, forcibly converted to Islam and married.

On January 20, 2025, three Muslims abducted Ariha Masih, a 12-year-old Christian girl, at gunpoint from her home in Punjab Province and threatened to sell her into sexual slavery. Her mother Sumera identified her daughter’s kidnapper as Sajjad (Saajhu) Baloch, a 40-year-old neighbor. Baloch and two accomplices had forced their way into the Masih family home.

A bill to criminalize forced conversion stalled in Pakistan’s National Assembly in 2021, even though reports showed an increase of 177% of such cases against religious minorities from the year before. The bill, which proposed that only “mature” non-Muslims be allowed to convert to Islam, was called “un-Islamic” by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony.

Six United Nations special rapporteurs wrote and published a letter to Pakistan’s government in 2022 on the practice of forced marriages and conversions. So far, no response, if any, has been made public. In 2024, the rapporteurs repeated their statement.

“The U.N. special rapporteurs demanded Pakistan raise the legal age for girls to marry to 18 as a deterrent against exploitation…

“The U.N. experts urged Pakistan to bring perpetrators to justice, enforce existing legal protections against child, early and forced marriage, abduction and trafficking of minority girls, and uphold the country’s international human rights obligations.”

It is unclear whether the efforts being made to protect children in Pakistan will succeed and actually lead to implementation. According to Qamar Rafiq, a human rights advocate from Pakistan:

“The current situation [in Pakistan] makes it unlikely that we will see a significant enough change in the country’s politics to formulate an Anti-Forced Conversion Bill any time soon.”

The organization Church in Chains on March 20 related:

“A serious issue for Christians in Pakistan is that every year hundreds of Christian girls and young women are abducted and forced to convert to Islam and marry their abductors…..

“Pakistan’s federal and provincial governments have failed to take action to address the issue, and parents often report that police do not help them to recover their daughters. Police are slow to register reports of abductions and perpetrators know that the likelihood of conviction is low. When cases come to court, judges tend to rule on the basis of Sharia (Islamic) law rather than federal law, so decisions go in favour of the perpetrators and the girls lose all contact with their families.

“Typically, a Christian or Hindu teenager from a poor family goes missing and after some time her distraught family is informed that she has voluntarily converted to Islam and married her alleged abductor.

“The girl is taken first to a local mosque or madrassa for conversion…. The girl’s age is usually entered on the conversion certificate as being over 18. The conversion ceremony may be followed immediately by a Nikah (Muslim wedding) and if the girl is underage the marriage certificate will falsify her age. Courts often refuse to accept official documentation such as birth, baptismal or school certificates as proof of age and insist on a medical examination, which is intrusive and cannot provide an accurate result.

“If a case comes to court, the girl is coerced into siding with her abductor, often through threats to kill her and her family if she does not testify that she converted and married of her own free will – her abductor may be in the courtroom when she delivers her testimony and Islamist mobs often pack the courtrooms, intimidating judges, lawyers and families, especially in lower courts…

“[T]he perpetrator and his supporters may be allowed access to the girl… and continue to pressurize and threaten her, and she may be put under pressure by older women in the refuge to go back to her abductor…

“On the occasions when a girl escapes or is rescued from her abductors, the ordeal does not end with her return to family life… because of ongoing threats from her abductor.”

The organization Insight UK reported on March 12:

“The Chanda Maharaj case in Pakistan highlights the plight of minority girls, particularly Hindus, subjected to abduction, forced conversion, and marriage. Chanda, a 15-year-old Hindu girl from Sindh, was kidnapped on August 12, 2022, by Shaman Magsi. She was forcibly converted to Islam, married to her abductor, and repeatedly assaulted. Despite her testimony and her family’s efforts to prove she was underage, Pakistan’s courts ruled in favour of the abductor, citing unreliable birth certificates and medical assessments claiming she was biologically older.”

According to Open Doors, widespread human rights abuses and the dictatorial nature of Pakistani politics enable Islamic terrorism:

“Pakistan is experiencing an increasingly Islamizing culture and is home to a plethora of radical Islamic groups. It is difficult to keep track of the different Islamist groups of varying size, names and influence, as they split, merge and re-appear as needed. One of the most recent ones entering the public sphere and claiming the headlines is Tehreek-e-Labaik (TLP). The Christian community feels increasingly trapped between these radical groups, the Islamic culture of Pakistani society and a government appeasing these groups. Those who hold a radical perspective based on Wahhabi ideology and who continue to buy into the caliphate theology and treatment of ‘infidels’, seem to have the strongest voice in society. They firmly identify themselves with supporters of the Islamic State group (IS) and the Taliban….

“The introduction of a ‘Single National Curriculum’ in schools denigrates religious minorities and enforces the teaching of the Quran and subjects like Mathematics and Science in an Islamized manner. Thus, religion is permeating school education, dividing children and families. Radical Islamic groups are flourishing — despite a continued crackdown on some of them by the army — and are used by various political groups as allies. Their power to mobilize hundreds of thousands of predominantly young people and take them to the streets remains a political tool and offers strong leverage for enforcing political goals. Even efforts to protect underage girls belonging to minority religions from being abducted, forcefully converted and married are hindered and often especially lower courts simply follow the claims made by the perpetrators about the victim’s age and free will…

“While successive governments have actively opposed some radical and violent groups, they have also tried to co-opt others and use them for (foreign) political means. Such groups are innumerable and even a ban will only make them re-organize, re-brand and re-emerge. The default option for dealing with radical Islamic movements (who are able to mobilize millions for street demonstrations) is appeasement and even accommodation…

“For many years politics in Pakistan has been family business, a trend which was only recently broken and is again back on track. However, whoever is in power in Pakistan tends to cling to it and will do whatever is needed to gain enough support. One strong driver in this is a political player which seldom operates openly: The army. The way the army courts some radical Islamic groups to use them as a tool leads to Christians being targeted by such groups as well.”

Those who caused harm to Christians have deliberately been left unpunished, Open Doors adds.

“One of the most concerning trends in recent years has been that vigilante attacks on suspected blasphemers are not only being tolerated, but actually celebrated. In one case of a Muslim accused of blasphemy who was killed by a policeman in what the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan referred to as an ‘extra-judicial killing’. This was the second such killing in one week. In the other case the family of the victim said they forgave the policeman who had killed their relative as indeed it was wrong to blaspheme. This impunity is clearly seen in the case of persecution of Christians by the fact that more than 90% of the suspects of the 2023 attack in Jaranwala are still at large.”

All Christians suffer institutionalized discrimination, notes Open Doors.

“Occupations that are deemed low, dirty, and degrading—such as cleaning sewers or working in brick kilns—are reserved for Christians by the authorities. Many believers are referred to as ‘chura’, a derogatory term meaning ‘filthy’. Christians are also vulnerable to being trapped in bonded labor.”

In January 2025, officials from the European Union issued a warning to Pakistan regarding human rights violations, including blasphemy laws, forced conversions, and other targeted persecution against religious minorities. If not addressed, Pakistan’s trade relations with the EU could be jeopardized.

Have Pakistani Texans done anything to help the victims of these horrific human rights abuses in Pakistan or raised awareness of them in any way while in the US? In what areas have they effectively cooperated with the US government? Have they used their resources to fight Islamic terror groups; if so, to what extent? Has Pakistan been a great US ally? What has the government of Pakistan actually done to deserve being celebrated with an official day by the Texas House of Representatives?

Uzay Bulut, a Turkish journalist, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.