July 22, 2024
By Xari Jalil
ISLAMABAD
On June 24, a girl almost her age, visited 14 year old Alina Masih at her home. This was surprising to her mother Saima Khatoon who had always known everything in her children’s lives, including all their friends, but had never met that girl before, and she said this out loud to her young guest.
“I told her, ‘Beta, you are most welcome in our home, but how is it that in the past three years that we have lived in this house, I have never seen or met you?” Saima tells Voicepk in an interview. Her brows knit together as she remembers the day which would change their lives forever and it all began with the girl’s visit. “But she answered that she and my daughter Alina were both friends from church. It was strange but I let it go, and left the room at that time. Now I wish I had stayed.”
Later that day, Saima had to leave home to check up on her daughter-in-law who had not been well. She decided to leave Alina at home as she would be back in a couple of hours, but by the time she came back the house was completely empty. There was no sign of Alina.
“I called my husband at once; We spent the rest of the entire day and night going door to door everywhere in and outside our neighborhood to check where Alina had gone,” says Saima. “What was puzzling was that she had never ever stepped outside the house on her own. We just didn’t allow it. I went with her to drop her to, and pick her from school, if she ever needed clothes or books I went with her to get them. Then how did this happen?”
The parents went to the local police station, Khanna to file an FIR. But they say the police were not very helpful.
“When we requested one of them to help us write an application, they refused. They asked to find someone who could stamp our application. We searched but it was late at night and we couldn’t find anyone. And then we were told that applications could not be accepted after midnight,” says the mother of four, from among whom Alina was the youngest. “Eventually the application was admitted the next morning which was also when the FIR was lodged.”
Abducted by the neighbour
Saima was still disturbed by the sudden visit of the young girl from the church parish who had met with Alina the very day she had disappeared. Tracing the girl’s address, she went with her son to her house and demanded to know where her daughter was.
“The girl got very scared when she saw us and begged me not to tell her parents she had come. And I instantly knew that she knew something. When we pushed her she then revealed that a man called Haider Ali, or Ballu Bhai as she referred to him, had sent her to Alina to give the message that he was standing on the street corner and she should come and meet him. After that the girl said she knew nothing more.”
The girl’s claim directly pointed to the involvement of one Haider Ali, whose family owned a butcher’s business in the area.
The police did file an FIR under Section 365-B of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) – for kidnapping, but the family insists that even though they contacted the police several times about having witnessed one of the family members in the market place, no one came to arrest them.
“They could be seen roaming around here in the streets for the next three days, and we kept calling the police but each time we heard an excuse from the Investigating Officer,” says Khalid Masih, Alina’s father, who works as a sanitary worker. “Sometimes he would be in a different location, other times it was something else. When this incident took place I also went to Zulfikar’s house and told him that I did not want to fight but that they should immediately return my daughter to me. But he just said to me that he would try and find her along with us – he did not accept that my daughter was with him.”
Zulfikar is the father of Haider Ali and Waqar Ali (Vicky), both of them accused.
Khalid had initially expressed his fear in the FIR, that his daughter was unsafe especially because they belonged to the Christian community. He claimed she had been abducted for ‘immoral reasons’ and that she could face immense and life threatening danger.
A day after the FIR was filed, Khalid came to know that Alina was to be presented in a Rawalpindi court to give a statement under Section 164 in front of a civil judge. However when they went there the girl was not presented and the case was dismissed by the judge due to non prosecution. When Khalid appeared before the Civil judge however he and his wife were both shocked to hear that his daughter had accepted Islam and had contracted Nikah with the accused Haider Ali.
“My daughter is just 14 years old,” says Saima. “At this age, children are malleable and can be bent in any direction. Does a 14 year old have a say on accepting an entirely new religion? I do not know what kind of green pastures he has shown her that she went to him like this.”
Besides the fact that fundamental rights given in the Constitution of Pakistan provide safeguard to minorities under Article 20, 22, 26, 27 and 37, the fact remains the legal age for marriage of a girl in Islamabad is at least 16 years.
The Federal Child Marriage Restraint Act (CMRA) of 1929 has not been formally amended to raise the minimum age for marriage. It originally set the minimum age for a girl to get married at 16 years old, and this has not been changed in the federal legislation. Islamabad, being a federally administered territory, likely relies on the CMRA by default. However, a landmark case (Mumtaz Bibi v Qasim) in the Islamabad High Court in 2022 declared child marriage under 18 to be illegal, potentially impacting the CMRA’s application.
Police negligence
The parents have been complaining for a month that the police has been extremely unhelpful, ignoring the fact that the accused have been reportedly seen on the streets after the FIR was filed. The parents say that they have even seen one of the members of the accused parties talking to the police outside the station. Other than that, it has been a month since the girl’s disappearance, but the police has not arrested anyone, nor have they detained anyone for questioning.
“Each time we call them, they say there has been little development,” said Saima through tears. “In this day and age, cant they trace someone’s whereabouts through cell phones, or other means? If this was their daughter would they have been sitting and relaxing as they are right now? When we pushed the IO to try to and recover our girl, he answered rudely saying, ‘what else am I supposed to do…bang my head against the wall?’ This is their response to us.”
A petition was filed by Khalid as petitioner in the Islamabad High Court under Section 199 (dealing with the powers of the High Courts issuing writs). The petition was versus the IG Islamabad Police, SSP Police Operations and the SHO Khanna Police Station. After the initial hearing, heard by Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kiyani, the police was asked to recover the girl. However just a day before the next hearing, i.e., July 23, the police arrested three persons of interest, including one Mukhtar Ahmed aka ‘Makhan‘, Faraz Ali, and Dilawar, all from the same community (Qasaab) as the accused.
The IO requested physical remand of the accused for investigation, which was granted for three days by the judicial magistrate.
“This is not the first and the last case of forced conversion seen in Pakistan,” says Safdar Chaudhry, Chairman of the Rah-e-Nijaat Ministry Pakistan and also a member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP). “There are two issues here. One is the fact that the girl is a minor. This makes the marriage invalid under any circumstances. On the nikahnama, it says the girl is 19 years old, but her school and her NADRA certificates prove that her age is of 14 years and 3 months. The other issue is of the forced change of religion. If the girl is a minor, how can she make such a big decision over the course of just one day?”
Chaudhry also says that girls who are abducted and converted face dangers even if they claim to have accepted Islam.
“They are never accepted by the boys’ family, which makes it impossible to live their lives in a normal way. But this is when they have married someone and changed their religion for that reason,” he says. “When the situation is such that the girl has been forced to change, even then they are not safe. Usually the girls are abducted, raped or gang raped repeatedly and possibly also sent into prostitution. Sometimes they are also victims of human trafficking, so they are never found.”
He says that issuing a declaration of Islam is not a big deal in such cases.
“Anyone can get a girl to make this statemen – lawyers have several ways of getting this done. But these are all informal statements. The only authentic statement is the one given under Section 164 in front of a Magistrate of Section 30. Only this is admissible in court.”
But Chaudhry deeply criticizes the way the justice system has become indifferent towards such cases.
“Whenever there is a case like this, we go to the police or the court, they look at us as if we have come from a different planet, as if this is not their problem,” he says. “I wont mince my words when I say whoever is a religious minority in this country gets a raw deal from the State.”