The US Capitol Hill negotiators have worked out an agreement between the Republicans and Democrats for a Covid-19 Relief Bill of a total 900 Billion Dollars as an economic relief package to help business and individuals and providing money to deliver vaccines to all its citizens. It has provisions for a 300$ per month supplemental as jobless benefit and a 600$ direct stimulus payment to most Americans.

The Bill atrociously provides a whopping $10 million grant to Pakistan for “gender programs” in Pakistan. It is a globally recognized fact that Pakistan pursues terrorism as a state policy and it is in the Grey list of Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global inter-governmental terror financing watchdog. It is amazing that the US itself has placed a bounty of $10 million over the UN designated Pakistani terrorist Hafiz Saeed who is nurtured and promoted brazenly by the Pakistani army, ISI and government. In fact, Pakistan has several terror factories and industries ostensibly run by Islamic fundamentalist mullahs who are actually only front offices for the Pakistani army which trains and arranges funds for these terrorists.

Moreover, nothing can be more ironical for the US to grant a largesse of $10 million for “gender programs” in Pakistan which has a notorious record of routinely kidnapping, raping, forcefully converting and marrying off young minor girls belonging to particularly minority communities like Hindus, Sikhs and Christians. In rural areas of Pakistan, Hindu families fear to educate their girl children as the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and many other Islamist organisations in well-planned manner target young minor girls, they  kidnap them, rape them, forcefully convert them and marry them off to their tormentors. When the families of the victim girls try to file criminal complaints, they are brutally beaten up and their complaint is not even registered by the police. After a lot of protests, hue and cry if they do manage to file criminal complaints of rape and kidnapping, the Judiciary denies kidnapping, rape and refuses to grant custody of the minor girls to her parents. They vilely rule that the conversions were not forceful and the minor girls married their 40-year-old abductors out of their own free will. Which civilized country’s judiciary in the world would give legitimacy to a forceful marriage and conversion of 13-year-old minor girls as is done in Pakistan?

We also have several cases of false accusations of blasphemy piled on Hindu and Christian minorities when they refuse to convert to Islam. We had the famous case of Asiya Bibi case where a poor Christian woman was falsely accused of blasphemy and awarded death penalty. After an international outcry, Asiya Bibi finally took refuge in the US. There are many such Asiyas in Pakistan who live a life of hell and are even murdered by the Islamists which is sanctioned by the state. Most of the minority victims in Pakistan hail from very poor backgrounds and marginal sections of society comprising Dalits of the Hindu community. Young girls from Sikh community are also equally targeted by the same drill of kidnapping, rape, forceful conversion and marriage to Islamist goons, as we saw recently in the case of Jagjit Kaur, daughter of a sevadar at the Nankana Saheb Gurudwara (the first Gurudwara established by the revered first Sikh Guru).

It is therefore appalling that the US is rewarding a country which has the dubious distinction of brutally persecuting minorities and targeting minority women and young girls with an obsessive vigour to completely stamp out the surviving miniscule minority of Pakistan. To address this issue India had made an amendment to the Citizens Act, called the Citizenship Amendment Act which would enable persecuted religious minorities of Pakistan and other neighbouring Islamic countries to take refuge in India.

The $10 million largesse offered by the US for “gender programs” would only fund many more kidnapping, rapes, forceful conversions and dubious marriages of young minor girls belonging to minority communities in Pakistan the same way as Pakistan uses the arms, ammunitions and F-16 fighter planes provided by the US to promote terrorism in India rather than the official purpose for combating terror in Afghanistan.

Why should the hard-earned US tax payers’ money be wasted to promote Islamic terrorism? The Covid-19 Relief Bill which is touted by the Democrats and Republicans as relief fund for hardworking Americans is actually swindling them by giving them a relief of mere 7-10% of the total $900 billion fund and squandering a majority of the funds on notorious terror breeding Pakistani and Palestinian (US Grant: $250 million) establishments. Thus, the Covid-19 Relief Bill instead of promoting welfare ‘gender programs’ rewards Pakistan for its notorious record of targeted ‘gender pogrom’ of religious minorities.               

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