Daily Times

For a country created to protect and house the Muslim minority of united India, Pakistan has fallen woefully short of providing fundamental rights to its own minorities. They do not know what it is like to freely profess and follow their religions and they do not even have very basic human rights. That is why Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court (SC) to direct the government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to get a prominent Hindu temple located in the district of Karak, restored and reconstructed is a very welcome step in restoring some faith our minorities may have once had in us. This temple has been mired in dispute since 1997 when local religious elements desecrated the temple, taking it over in such a way that it was unfit for worship by the Hindu community. Hindus have been making a pilgrimage to this temple, which is the place Shri Paramhans Ji Maharaj died in 1919. The mufti who initiated the dismantling of the temple accepted money to vacate it in 1997 but still did not budge. Since then, numerous attempts at reconstructing the temple have met with failure. That is why PML-N MNA Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani — a Hindu himself — approached the apex court and pointed out the increasing incidents of desecration of Hindu temples, citing the example of this particular one. This is a small drop in the ocean of hate mongering, discrimination and negligence against the Hindu community in Pakistan.

Another notable development is the willingness of parliament to introduce the Hindu Marriage Act to help facilitate the registration of marriages of Hindus. The sorry fact remains that in Pakistan marriages in the Hindu community are not registered, meaning they are not recognised by the state. This in turn launches the vicious cycle of divorces also not being recognised because the marriage was not registered in the first place! There is a long and inglorious tradition of the abduction and conversion of young Hindu girls by Muslim men, particularly in Sindh. They are fodder for such barbarians who do not even care if the girls are married or not in the first place because the law of the land is not on the side of these victims. The SC now wants a report on how the provinces will implement the registration of Hindu marriages as this is a provincial provision. Time will tell but at least the right noises are now being made.
Whether it is maulvis who desecrate the worship places of our minorities or the state that desecrates their rights, it is now high time to facilitate our citizens, no matter what their religious identity, to be able to own up to the rights granted to them in the Constitution. *