‘We Left Before They Could Take Us’: Hindu Girls Flee Pakistan for a Fragile Safety

As tensions rise between India and Pakistan, a long-standing issue draws renewed attention: the status of Hindus in Pakistan and their struggle for dignity in India. 

In a rare reprieve, India’s Home Ministry has exempted them from deportation and allowed those on long-term visas to stay, even as other Pakistani nationals are ordered to leave immediately.

Pakistan Army chief General Asim Munir recently went viral with a speech in which he declared his country’s differences with India, saying: “Our forefathers thought we were different from Hindus in every possible aspect of life. Our religion is different, our customs are different, our traditions are different, our thoughts are different, our ambitions are different. That’s where the foundation of the two-nation theory was laid. We are two nations, we are not one nation.”

Munir’s remarks, invoking the long-standing two-nation theory that underpinned the partition of India and Pakistan, reignited scrutiny over the treatment of religious minorities within Pakistan, particularly Hindus. The general’s stark framing of religious differences highlights the growing concern among human rights leaders, psychologists, and community organizers about the status of Hindus in Pakistan, especially vulnerable girls and women facing threats of abduction, forced conversion, and coerced marriage.

Many families see migration to India as their only chance at a life free from fear, hoping for safety and dignity. But while they may find the freedom to live without fear, dignity remains elusive.

In 2012, Dharam was only 13 when her family left their home in Mirpur Khas, a city in Pakistan’s second-largest province of Sindh, and moved to India. She has faint memories of the place she used to call home, but the ones that remain aren’t the kind she wants to remember.

“We couldn’t walk around freely, and never traveled alone. Even though our school was only a short distance away, we always walked in large groups,” she told More to Her Story. “If we walked alone, the boys would often harass us.”

Not long after they left, she heard from relatives still in Pakistan that one of their previous neighbors, a young, beautiful girl, had been abducted. She had caught the wrong kind of attention.

“You couldn’t even complain because no one wanted to interfere. Before that could happen to us, we left Pakistan,” Dharam said. To protect her identity, only her first name is used.

Pakistan’s 2023 census records a population of 240.5 million people, with Muslims comprising 96.4 percent of the population and less than 2 percent Hindus. Numbering about two million, Hindus are mostly from lower castes, residing in the southern province of Sindh. While upper-caste Hindus report that business people mostly risk being abducted, lower-caste families say that it’s often their daughters who are more vulnerable to the threat of kidnapping.

"In some cases, mobs accompany the abductors when girls are taken. These incidents are common, particularly among lower socioeconomic groups. It’s not that it doesn’t happen to wealthier families, but they often manage to protect themselves by paying bribes," said Hindu Singh Sodha, president of the Seemant Lok Sangathan, an organization based in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, in India, working for the welfare of Hindu migrant families from Pakistan since 1997.

While Pakistan’s Hindu minority has faced issues since 1947, when the nations of India and Pakistan were established after the end of British rule over India, there is a growing spotlight being cast in recent years on the challenges they face. After the partition of the two nations, there was a brutal and bloody movement of Hindus from Pakistan to India and Muslims from India to Pakistan.

In 2020, Pakistan’s foreign office spokesperson Zahid Hafiz Chaudhri told Radio Pakistan that the allegations of forced conversions were often found to be “fictitious, politically motivated, or based on the mala fide intention of our detractors to malign Pakistan in the international community,” thereby denying its existence.

The next year, in October 2021, the parliamentary committee dismissed a bill proposed to protect minorities against forced conversions. The bill also faced opposition from Pakistan’s Ministry of Religious Affairs, where lawmakers argued that introducing an age restriction for religious conversion among non-Muslims goes against principles of Islam and the Pakistani Constitution.

Then, in 2022, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a non-governmental authority with leading Pakistani human rights lawyers, advocates, and experts among its board members, released a damning report, titled, “A Breach of Faith: Freedom of Religion or Belief in 2021-2022,” highlighting concerns over rising kidnappings, forced conversions, and marriages of minority girls and young women, with an estimated 500 cases in 2022. 

In 2023, the U.S. The State Department released a report, “International Religious Freedom: Pakistan,” which noted that a UN expert panel was “deeply troubled” by rising reports of abductions, forced marriages, and forced conversions of underage girls and women in the country. In late December 2023, the U.S. State Department once again redesignated Pakistan as a Country of Particular Concern for its systematic and ongoing violations of religious freedom.

That year, the NGO Center for Social Justice, based in Lahore, Pakistan, recorded 124 cases of forced conversions involving girls and women from the minority Hindu community. Of the total, 23 percent were girls below the age of 14, 36 percent of the cases were between the ages of 14 and 18, and 12 percent of the victims were adults. 

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which has published several fact-finding reports on minority rights and forced conversions, has often urged authorities to collect accurate data to gauge the actual scale of the problem. So far, such data is missing. 

Recently, Deepti Mahajan, the director of Chingari, a project at HinduPACT, an organization based in the U.S., and Rahul Sur, a former officer of  the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services and a former inspector general of police in India, submitted a complaint to the United Nations Human Rights Council with a network of multifaith leaders about the “slow but relentless ‘drip, drip’ genocide of minority Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.” An anonymous Hindu in Pakistan stepped forward to file the complaint after losing his sister to forced conversion, with no justice from the police or judges in Pakistan.

Leaving Pakistan for India as a Hindu

In 2014, Ram Chander Solanki, now 40, also left the city of Mirpur Khas to move to India, for the sake of his children. He had one daughter, then about four years old, and five sons.

"In Pakistan, many girls can't go to school because 12- to 13-year-olds are often abducted. Parents are scared, so they keep their daughters at home. The feudal system also forces families into bonded labor; that is why many prefer to marry off their girls early," said Solanki, whose daughter is now a tenth grader.

“We don’t fear for her safety like one would in Pakistan.”

Solanki said that kidnappers in Pakistan identify Hindu girls by their clothing. They often wear bangles or traditional outfits with skirts and blouses, which Muslim girls don’t typically wear, making them easy targets.

Ghulam Hussain, assistant professor of applied anthropology at Bahria University in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, acknowledged in an interview that non-Muslim citizens of Pakistan “face certain challenges,” because Pakistan is “a Muslim-majority country.” “The minority’s narrative won’t hold in these countries,” he said. “They want a secular state, but we are officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.”

He attributed the phenomenon of forced conversions to interpretations of Islamic law, or sharia, that demand that a non-Muslim convert to Islam before a Muslim man can marry her. “You could call it an induced conversion, shaped by societal norms and values," he said. 

Some Islamic scholars, including the late Asghar Ali Engineer, an author in Mumbai, argued that Muslim men and women can marry non-Muslims without demanding conversions because, he said, marital contracts were expressions of personal contracts, free from interference from the state.

Nonetheless, experts say, the prevailing interpretation of Islamic law creates a power imbalance for non-Muslims in Pakistan. Sodha said that this inequality is precisely why Hindus are treated like second-class citizens in Pakistan.

After the partition of India into two countries in 1947, “when conditions worsened, with a lack of constitutional protection, absence of minority rights, persecution and discrimination,” he said, “people started leaving.”

He added, “The moment Pakistan declared itself an Islamic Republic, non-Muslims became second-class citizens. Regional hostility makes things even more complicated for us.”

Sodha said Hindu migrants move from Pakistan to India today to escape forced conversions and forced marriages.

In 2021, local media in Pakistan reported about 60 cases of forced conversions, with 70 percent of the cases involving girls under 18, according to activist Peter Jacob, director of Center for Social Justice. Data from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan for Sindh noted at least 10 cases of forced conversions in the last six months of 2021 and 11 more cases in the first half of 2022. Hussain argues that the numbers lack thorough research, claiming that many cases, when independently verified, turned out to be false.

Maheen Pracha, senior manager of communications and research at the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, replied in an email statement that “our report clearly states that fear of religious persecution is not the only factor driving Hindu migration and that economic insecurity is indeed an important factor... Our reports from the field also suggest that religious intolerance is one of several reasons for migration and that, too often, is limited to upper-caste Hindu families who can afford to leave.”

Accurate numerical data on the number of such migrants is difficult to establish (beyond often unsubstantiated figures quoted in the press), as we state.”

While Sodha has good memories of the life that he left behind in Pakistan in the 1970s, he believes that Hindu families will continue to migrate to India. Their rehabilitation while awaiting citizenship, however, remains a major challenge.

“They arrived with hopes of a better future, but now many are forced to return and convert to Islam for their safety,” said Sodha, referring to about 800 Hindus who returned to Pakistan in 2022 when their citizenship process was delayed interminably in India.

“It felt like I had failed in my mission to establish a framework in a friendly region. We tried to collaborate with numerous organizations and political parties, yet despite those efforts, if people still have to return to their country of origin, it is both painful for us and shameful for the government," said Sodha.

The failures come down to a lack of political will to resolve the unfair conditions in which Pakistani Hindu refugees live in limbo, said Sodha..

Meanwhile, women refugees in these camps face different challenges.

Dharam may have found safety in India, but daily life is a struggle with no proper housing, clean streets or available toilets. Hindu refugees from Pakistan live in Anganwah encampments in Jodhpur, Rajasthan. "We lived in a kutcha house back home,” said 75-year-old Seeta, referring to homes built of mud and wood, “ and we still live in one here.” 

“There are no toilets, so we have to relieve ourselves in the open," she said. 

Solanki, who advocates for the rights of Hindu migrants in the camp, said he has repeatedly raised concerns about the camp’s poor living conditions with the highest administrative officials in the Rajasthan state government, while Sodha liaises with the Ministry of Home Affairs and External Affairs, but nothing has improved.

"We don’t have electricity, which makes it hard for our children to study. During the monsoons, our homes are filled with insects and scorpions, and stagnant water in the streets puts us at risk of contracting diseases. There are no toilets here either. Earlier, when the camp was emptier, people could manage in the open, but now it’s overcrowded. Women have nowhere to go, and we still don’t have toilets at home."

Dharam said their homes sit on unmarked land, which means they can’t build proper streets or even basic toilets.

“When it rains, our home gets flooded.”

While Sodha expressed gratitude to the government of India for its generosity in welcoming refugees, he said the country needs a comprehensive policy for citizenship and rehabilitation.

“One generation struggles because they’re non-citizens, and their children inherit that struggle. If you gave them refugee status because they were fleeing persecution, and they were once part of undivided India, then why is there no plan to rehabilitate them? Where are they supposed to go?”