MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

“LAHORE (Pakistan) – It was barely 4am when 19-year-old Rinkal Kumari disappeared from her home in a small village in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province. When her parents awoke they found only her slippers and a scarf outside the door.

A few hours later her father got a call telling him his daughter, a Hindu, had converted to Islam to marry a Muslim boy.

Only days later, Ms Seema Bibi, a Christian woman in the province of Punjab, was kidnapped along with her four children after her husband couldn’t repay a loan to a large landlord. Within hours, her husband was told his wife had converted to Islam and wouldn’t be coming home. Ms Seema Bibi escaped, fled the village and has gone underground with her husband and children.

Hindu and Christian representatives say forced conversions to Islam have become the latest weapon of Islamic extremists in what they call a growing campaign against Pakistan’s religious minorities, on top of assassinations and mob intimidation of houses of worship. The groups are increasingly wondering if they still have a place in Pakistan.

‘It is a conspiracy that Hindus and Christians and other minorities should leave Pakistan,’ says Mr Amar Lal, the lawyer representing Ms Kumari in the Supreme Court. ‘As a minority, we feel more and more insecure. It is getting worse day by day.’…

‘Christian and Hindu girls are targeted more and more,’ says Father Emmanuel Yousaf, who heads the National Commission for Justice and Peace, an organization born out of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference.” Read more.

Flashback: Pakistan: Study: 74% of women from minority communities suffer sexual harassment – “Around 74 percent of Pakistani women from minority communities — Christians and Hindus — were sexually harassed, while 43 percent faced religious discrimination at workplaces in 2010 and 2011, a study said. Around 27 percent of minority women faced discrimination in admission to educational institutions and were forced to take Islamic studies for absence of any alternative subject, said National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) executive director Peter Jacob.”Read more.