President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif sent Diwali greetings to Pakistan’s Hindu community on Sunday, 8 November, and both promised to protect minority rights. The prime minister said the Constitution guarantees protection of the religious and civil rights of minorities. The president said protecting those rights is a shared responsibility for every citizen. They arrived three weeks after the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan published the hard numbers behind them. The numbers do not match the words.
What the leaders promised
The prime minister called the Hindu community a valued and integral part of the national fabric. His message, issued by the Prime Minister’s Office on 7 November, described Diwali as the triumph of light over the darkness of hatred, intolerance and despair. President Zardari praised the community’s contributions to education, healthcare, business and public service, and said the country’s diversity is a strength, not a weakness. He recalled Jinnah’s address of 11 August 1947, in which the founder said faith, caste or creed would not hinder equal citizenship.
The commission that still does not exist
Commitment has a test, and it already has a date. Parliament passed the National Commission for Minorities Act in 2025, creating a statutory body to protect minority rights. When the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan released its seventh annual report on freedom of religion or belief, Sanctuary Denied, on 15 October, the commission still had not been set up, about seven months after the law passed. The report covers 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026 and welcomed the Act as a real step. It then recorded the step that never followed: no chairperson, no members, no office. As of 8 November, no announcement of the commission being constituted has appeared. The body meant to turn the Diwali promises into casework does not exist yet.
559 people in jail, most awaiting trial
The report’s hardest number comes from the Punjab Prisons Department. On 28 June 2026, 559 people accused of blasphemy were in custody in Punjab. Of those, 491 were undertrials, people not convicted of anything. Seven were condemned prisoners. Five were women and one was a juvenile. Put plainly, nearly nine in ten people in Punjab’s blasphemy custody await trial instead of serving a sentence. The report says blasphemy accusations are still used to settle personal scores and extort money, and that weak investigations and social pressure produce prosecutions on questionable evidence. It also says the alleged perpetrators of an organised network that entraps people in fabricated blasphemy cases have yet to be investigated at all. In October, a mob in Narang Mandi burned a Christian family’s home over a blasphemy claim.
The girls taken from Sindh
The same gap runs through the findings on forced conversions. United Nations experts cited in the report found about 75 percent of forced conversion victims in 2025 were Hindu and 25 percent Christian, and about 80 percent of reported incidents happened in Sindh. Girls aged 14 to 18 were the most vulnerable. Hindu rights activist Faqir Shiva Kachhi put a count on it: 36 underage Hindu girls were abducted in 2025, and 32 more in the first seven months of 2026. That is 68 girls in 19 months. The pace is rising: about three a month in 2025, and about 4.6 a month in the first seven months of 2026. The report blames poverty, which already traps 29 percent of Pakistanis, and inadequate police responses. Punjab and Balochistan have raised the minimum marriageable age to 18, while Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has still not passed such a law.
The attacks the report names
Two more findings show how far the promise still has to travel. The report documents two extremist attacks on the Ahmadiyya community in Chenab Nagar, alongside increasingly open attempts to exclude Ahmadis from public and commercial life. A community representative told the launch the community’s last public gathering took place more than 40 years ago. On 9 October, a mob set fire to the dispensary of Kamran Gill, a Christian medical practitioner in Sheikhupura, after an allegation that he had shared blasphemous content on social media. HRCP director Farah Zia warned at the launch that the state’s approach is becoming increasingly exclusionary. PakMirror reported in October how a 200-year-old Ram Leela temple was sealed twice in four days.
Three tests to watch
First, will the government constitute the minorities commission before the year ends, nearly nine months after the Act passed? Second, will the alleged blasphemy entrapment network be investigated, and will the 491 undertrials in Punjab see their cases move? Third, will Khyber Pakhtunkhwa pass the minimum marriage age law of 18, closing the last provincial gap? The greetings are on the record. The next HRCP report will measure them. More national news from Pakistan
