ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN, July 2, 2012 (rediff.com): Sixty-five years after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the government is about to introduce a marriage registration bill for Hindus, the largest religious minority in Pakistan, whose marriages are not registered officially, leaving the Hindus exposed to malpractices of false conversion and forcible marriage.
Although the over 4.5 million Hindus constitute the biggest minority in the country, successive governments have simply failed to accord them their due rights as citizens. Pakistan’s Hindu community had been demanding the enactment of a Hindu registration bill from the time India’s Parliament had passed the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955. The need for it arose from the absence of a legal mechanism in Pakistan to register the marriages of Hindus and Sikhs. With no legal documents to prove they were married to each other, Hindu and Sikh couples living in Pakistan encountered huge problems at the time of migrating or working abroad.
Since marriages did not have a legal sanction in Pakistan, Hindu wives could not legally claim the property of their dead husbands. Religious bigots brazenly exploited the absence of a legal mechanism to register marriages. For years, Hindu women living in Pakistan, even those married and having children, have been abducted and forcibly converted to Islam, and re-married to Muslim men without their consent. And in the absence of a marriage document, their husbands or family members were hamstrung in petitioning courts. In the latest development, adviser to the prime minister on human rights, Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar, has informed that an amendment Marriage Registration Bill for Hindus is almost ready and would be presented before the parliament for approval shortly. “As the country’s Hindu community had failed to develop a consensus on some contentious clauses in the Hindu Marriage Registration Bill 2011, the PPP government has decided to introduce a new one. The proposed bill will provide an opportunity to ease the problems facing the Hindu community,” he added.