[amdavadis4ever] A SAD STORY!!!! :(( In Pak, minor Hindu girl forced to marry Muslim landowner

 

In Pak, minor Hindu girl forced to marry Muslim landowner KARACHI AP   The girl called Jeevti was just 14 when she taken from her family in the night to be married off to a Muslim man who says her family owed him $1,000. Her mother, Ameri Kashi Kohli, is sure that her daughter paid the price for a never-ending debt. It's a familiar story here in southern Pakistan: Small loans balloon into impossible debts, bills multiply and payments are never deducted. In this world, women like Ameri and her young daughter are treated as property: taken as payment for a debt, to settle disputes, or as revenge if a landowner wants to punish his worker.Sometimes parents, burdened by an unforgiving debt, even offer their daughters as payment. The women are like trophies to the men.They choose the prettiest, the young and pliable.Sometimes they take them as second wives to look after their homes. Sometimes they use them as prostitutes to earn money. Sometimes they take them simply because they can. An estimated 1,000 young Christian and Hindu girls, most of them underage and impoverished, are taken from their homes each year, converted to Islam and married, said a report by the South Asia Partnership organization. The night Jeevti disappeared, the family had slept outside the only way to endure the brutal summer heat here in southern Sindh province.In the morning, she was gone. No one heard anything, her mother says. "I went to the police and to the court. But no one is listening to us," says Ameri, who is Hindu.She says the land manager made her daughter convert to Islam and took the girl as his second wife. The family turned to activist Veero Kohli to help free the girl. Kohli, who isn't related to the family, was born a slave. Since fleeing bondage in 1999, she has liberated thousands of families. Five months ago, she went with Ameri to the Piyaro Lundh police station to find her daughter. They said the girl went willingly, Kohli says."I told them: `Let her mother talk to her if she went freely.'" They refused. Instead, they called in the man who Ameri said had taken her daughter. Hamid Brohi, came alone. "He said, `Anyway, she is payment for 100,000 rupees ($1,000) they owe me,'" Kohli recalls. Now Kohli is returning to the same police station, where police officer Aqueel Ahmed shows her an court affidavit in which the girl, who now goes by the name Fatima, said she had converted freely and married Brohi of her own free will. She also said she couldn't meet her mother because now she was Muslim and her family was Hindu. Under pressure, police finally take Kohli and a foreign reporter to visit the girl. Broh greets the police with an embrace and angrily denies he took Jeevti as payment for the family's debt. Inside, Jeevti sits on a double mattress on the floor, her head wrapped in a black shawl. Although she doesn't seem afraid, her eyes dart to the door where her husband hovers. When she speaks, her words seem rehearsed. "I married him because I wanted to," she says. She denies that she hasn't seen her mother.But she can't say when she saw her mother last or even where she lives, now that the family has fled its old home. She says she doesn't know about the court affidavit, although the police said Jeevti had spoken the words herself.

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Posted by: Bhupendra Jesrani <jesranibd@yahoo.co.in>

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