On December 26, 2025, a 15-year-old Hindu girl, Premi Bhil, was abducted from Tando Jan Muhammad in Mirpur Khas District of Pakistan’s Sindh Province. Within days, she was forcibly converted to Islam, renamed Kulsoom Sheikh, and married to Shehbaz Mahar—over 30 years old and already married. The incident was not an aberration. It was another data point in a long, grim pattern of abuse that the Pakistani state has proven either unwilling or incapable of stopping.

Just weeks earlier, on December 6, a Hindu woman and her minor daughter were kidnapped at gunpoint from Karachi’s Sher Shah area. On December 5, Pastor Kamran Salamat was shot dead in Gujranwala, Punjab—his second targeted attack in less than three months. In October, gunmen opened fire inside an Ahmadi place of worship in Rabwah (Chiniot), injuring worshippers during Friday prayers. In August, a mob attacked 80 Christian families in Sahiwal; many victims were later charged under the Anti-Terrorism Act and subjected to police brutality—an inversion of justice that has become routine.

These are not isolated crimes. They are symptoms of a structural failure.

According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) Annual Report 2025, 96.5 per cent of Pakistan’s estimated 252 million population is Muslim, while just 3.5 per cent belongs to religious minorities—Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Ahmadis, Parsis, and others. Yet this small minority bears a disproportionate burden of violence, discrimination, and fear.

Religious minorities in Pakistan face routine harassment, fabricated blasphemy allegations, mob violence, lynching, land grabbing, arbitrary detention, forced conversions, and the destruction of places of worship and cemeteries. The law offers little refuge. The state offers even less.

The Centre for Social Justice’s Human Rights Observer 2025 documents at least 421 cases of abduction and forced conversion of minority girls and women between 2021 and 2024. Of these, 282 were Hindu girls and 137 Christian girls. Nearly half were between 14 and 18 years old; over one-fifth were under 14. These are children—systematically preyed upon, trafficked through forced religious conversion, and “legalised” via coerced marriages rubber-stamped by compliant courts.

Over the past decade, Pakistan has witnessed dozens of mob lynchings linked to blasphemy allegations—often without evidence, investigation, or due process. Among the most notorious were the 2021 lynching of Priyantha Kumara Diyawadana, a Sri Lankan Christian, in Sialkot; the 2023 lynching of Muhammad Waris inside a police station in Nankana Sahib; and the 2025 lynching of Laeeq Ahmad Cheema, an Ahmadi man, in Karachi.

Impunity fuels repetition. According to Pakistan’s National Commission for Human Rights, blasphemy-related incarcerations surged from 11 cases in 2020 to 767 by mid-2024. The accusation itself has become the punishment—often a death sentence delivered by mobs while the state looks away.

Physical erasure accompanies social persecution. A December 2025 report to Pakistan’s Parliamentary Committee on the Minority Caucus revealed that of 1,285 Hindu temples and 532 Sikh gurudwaras, only 37 are functional nationwide. Many have been converted into shops, schools, government offices, or private homes. In April 2024, a historic Hindu temple in Landi Kotal, Khyber District, was demolished for a commercial complex.

Sacred sites have been openly threatened. In January 2020, a mob attacked Gurudwara Nankana Sahib, vowing to destroy it and rename it. Ahmadis have fared worse: the Systemic Persecution of Religious Minorities in Pakistan report notes that 20 Ahmadi houses of worship were demolished in 2024 and 17 more in 2025 (by mid-August). These acts occur with either administrative neglect or active local complicity.

Discrimination extends beyond violence into enforced humiliation. Christians—many descended from historically oppressed communities—are overwhelmingly pushed into sanitation work. While Pakistan’s Constitution bans forced labour and guarantees equality, municipalities continue to hire manual scavengers almost exclusively from Christian communities.

The Australian Government’s DFAT Country Information Report (April 30, 2025) cites Pakistan’s National Human Rights Commission in noting that Christians occupy over 80 per cent of sanitation and sewage jobs nationwide. Deutsche Welle reports that 90 per cent of Islamabad’s sanitation workforce is Christian. This is not coincidence; it is caste-by-religion segregation sustained by the state.

On December 2, 2025, Pakistan’s Parliament passed the National Commission for Minorities Bill 2025. On paper, it creates an 18-member body to investigate violations and advise the government. In reality, the revised law strips the Commission of core powers: it cannot summon witnesses, inspect detention centres, or initiate inquiries on its own.

An earlier version of the Bill—returned by President Asif Ali Zardari for broader discussion—had included these powers. The government removed them. What remains is a managed façade, not a watchdog. A shield for international optics, not a sword for justice. Pakistan’s minority persecution is not a failure of awareness. It is a failure of will. Systemic intolerance, weak law enforcement, politicised religion, and entrenched impunity have combined to hollow out constitutional guarantees and erode social cohesion. Each forced conversion, each lynching, each demolished shrine chips away at Pakistan’s internal stability and international credibility.

The state cannot plead ignorance. The evidence is overwhelming, the pattern unmistakable. Until Pakistan confronts this crisis honestly—by enforcing the law against perpetrators rather than victims, restoring institutional accountability, and dismantling the ideological scaffolding that enables abuse—its claims of pluralism and reform will remain hollow.

What is unfolding is not merely a human rights issue. It is a slow-burning legitimacy crisis—one that Pakistan continues to ignore at its peril.