In Pakistan, Hindus say woman's conversion to Islam was coerced.

In Pakistan, Hindus say woman's conversion to Islam was coerced.(NDTV).In the predawn darkness on Feb. 24, Rinkel Kumari, a 19-year-old student from a Hindu family, disappeared from her home in Mirpur Mathelo, a small village off a busy highway in Sindh Province. Hours later, she resurfaced 12 miles away, at the home of a prominent Muslim cleric who phoned her parents with news that distressed them: Their daughter wished to convert to Islam, he said.
Their protests were futile. By sunset, Ms. Kumari had become a Muslim, married a young Muslim man, and changed her name to Faryal Bibi.
Over the past month, this conversion has generated an acrid controversy that has reverberated far beyond its origins in small-town Pakistan, whipping up a news media frenzy that has traced ugly sectarian divisions and renewed a wider debate about the protection of vulnerable minorities in a country that has so often failed them. At its heart, though, it is a head-on clash of narratives and motives.
Hindu leaders insist that Ms. Kumari was abducted at gunpoint and forced to abandon her religion. Local Muslim leaders say she wanted to marry her secret sweetheart: Naveed Shah, a young neighbor who said he had been conducting a secret courtship with her via mobile phone and the Internet for several months. Ms. Kumari, for her part, has said in a court filing and media interviews that she converted of her free will - but public figures have questioned whether she had been pressed or intimidated into saying that.
The truth may emerge Monday, when the young woman is due to testify before the Supreme Court in Islamabad. For the past two weeks she has been sequestered in a women's shelter in Karachi on court orders. When she takes the stand on Monday, many Pakistanis hope she can resolve the central mystery: where do her religious, and romantic, intentions lie?
After Ms. Kumari declared herself a Muslim in her town court on Feb. 27, Mr. Mitho triumphantly led the new convert from the courthouse, parading her before thousands of cheering supporters. Then he drove her in a caravan to an ancient Sufi religious shrine controlled by his family and famed as a site where Hindus have been converted.
There, Ms. Kumari was welcomed by Mr. Mitho's elderly brother, Mian Shaman - the same cleric who had converted her three days earlier - who led her into the towering shrine. When she emerged, now wearing a black veil, gunmen unleashed volleys of celebratory Kalashnikov fire into the air and shouted "God is calling you!"
Hindu leaders, enraged, viewed the images as a crass provocation. "If the couple was really in love, then why this fanfare of guns?" said Amarnath Motumal, a Hindu lawyer and human rights activist in Karachi. "It clearly shows they are trying to embarrass the Hindu community and are bent on taking our girls forcefully."
Ms. Kumari's parents pursued the case through the courts, claiming that their daughter had been abducted by a Muslim supremacist, and that the police and judiciary were biased against them because they came from a minority background.
"Mian Mitho is a terrorist and a thug. He takes the girls, and keeps them in his home for sexual purposes," said Ms. Kumari's father, Nand Lal, a government schoolteacher, noting that Mr. Mitho's armed guards had escorted his daughter to court appearances and news conferences. His wife, Sulachany Devi, issued an anguished appeal. "Rinkel was my blood, and she remains my blood. All I want is for her to return home," she said.
The case has caused division within the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party, of which Mr. Mitho is a member. Earlier this month, President Asif Ali Zardari privately intervened to have Ms. Kumari taken into protective custody. Later, the president's sister, Dr. Azra Fazal Pechuho, delivered an impassioned speech to Parliament about the plight of the Hindu community.
"I have a lot of discomfort with this kind of behavior," said a senior party member from Sindh Province, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the matter. "The state is not giving the Hindus an equal environment. So they are turning to a narrative of forced conversion to fight back."
Pir Muhammad Shah, the local police chief, agreed that Mr. Mitho's actions had aggravated the situation. "It teased the whole Hindu community, and led them to believe the conversion had been done at gunpoint."
Officials with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan have spoken of up to 20 forced conversions a month - and Hindu families fleeing for India - but they admit that the research is thin.
As Ms. Kumari's anticipated court date nears, it has revived many old tensions. And while no one is expecting widespread violence in her case, in some of its particulars it bears a remarkable resemblance to an earlier conversion scandal - one in 1936, when a British magistrate returned a Hindu girl to her parents after she had been converted. The result was an 11-year uprising by Muslim Pashtun tribesmen that at one point involved 40,000 British troops.Read the full story here.