LAHORE: In a historic move, Pakistan’s Punjab Assembly passed a law on Wednesday that recognizes the separate religious identity of the country’s Sikh community by allowing its members to register their marriages with union councils according to their own family law.
The Punjab Sikh Anand Karaj Marriages Act, 2018, was tabled in the House by Sardar Ramesh Singh Arora last Friday after getting approval from the Standing Committee on Minorities and Human Rights.
“I am really happy that we have got recognition today by getting our own family law,” said Gurmeet Singh to Arab News. He had come from Nankana Sahib to witness the historic moment at the Punjab Assembly. “Even in India, our marriages are registered under the Hindu Marriage law,” he said.
About 25,000 Sikhs live in Pakistan with the majority in the provinces of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The tomb of the founder of their religion, Guru Nanak, is in Nankana Sahib which is 80 km from Lahore.
Given the religious significance of Pakistan’s Punjab province, Sikhs from different parts of the world, especially India, Canada and the US, visit the province every year in order to perform their religious rituals.
While Pakistan does not have a huge Sikh population, it has benefited their global community by setting an example for other parts of the world and accepting their separate religious identity.
“It is a great moment in our country’s history,” Ramesh Singh Arora told Arab News. “Pakistan will gain global recognition for passing this first-of-its-kind legislation.”
Members of the Sikh community who live in Punjab can now register their marriages — or dissolutions — with union councils under a law that sets them apart from the Muslim majority.
The union councils have also been authorized to issue them with marriage certificates that were previously denied them in the absence of a relevant legal framework.
The Sikh marriage certificates will also be acceptable to the National Database Registration Authority (NADRA), making it possible for community members to get documents that are necessary to prove their ties at the international level and get family visas.
“Getting one’s marriage registered is every citizen’s fundamental right,” said Provincial Minister for Minorities’ Affairs, Tahir Khalil Sindhu, when he spoke to the Punjab Assembly. “The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz government believes in protecting the basic rights of every citizen and we support this law.”
Punjab Assembly makes history by passing Sikh Marriages Act
Punjab Assembly makes history by passing Sikh Marriages Act
These shy, scaly anteaters are the most trafficked mammals in the world
CAPE TOWN, South Africa: They are hunted for their unique scales, and the demand makes them the most trafficked mammal in the world.
Wildlife conservationists are again raising the plight of pangolins, the shy, scaly anteaters found in parts of Africa and Asia, on World Pangolin Day on Saturday.
Pangolins or pangolin products outstrip any other mammal when it comes to wildlife smuggling, with more than half a million pangolins seized in anti-trafficking operations between 2016 and 2024, according to a report last year by CITES, the global authority on the trading of endangered plant and animal species.
The World Wildlife Fund estimates that over a million pangolins were taken from the wild over the last decade, including those that were never intercepted.
Pangolins meat is a delicacy in places, but the driving force behind the illegal trade is their scales, which are made of keratin, the protein also found in human hair and fingernails. The scales are in high demand in China and other parts of Asia due to the unproven belief that they cure a range of ailments when made into traditional medicine.
There are eight pangolin species, four in Africa and four in Asia. All of them face a high, very high or extremely high risk of extinction.
While they’re sometimes known as scaly anteaters, pangolins are not related in any way to anteaters or armadillos.
They are unique in that they are the only mammals covered completely in keratin scales, which overlap and have sharp edges. They are the perfect defense mechanism, allowing a pangolin to roll up into an armored ball that even lions struggle to get to grip with, leaving the nocturnal ant and termite eaters with few natural predators.
But they have no real defense against human hunters. And in conservation terms, they don’t resonate in the way that elephants, rhinos or tigers do despite their fascinating intricacies — like their sticky insect-nabbing tongues being almost as long as their bodies.
While some reports indicate a downward trend in pangolin trafficking since the COVID-19 pandemic, they are still being poached at an alarming rate across parts of Africa, according to conservationists.
Nigeria is one of the global hot spots. There, Dr. Mark Ofua, a wildlife veterinarian and the West Africa representative for the Wild Africa conservation group, has rescued pangolins for more than a decade, which started with him scouring bushmeat markets for animals he could buy and save. He runs an animal rescue center and a pangolin orphanage in Lagos.
His mission is to raise awareness of pangolins in Nigeria through a wildlife show for kids and a tactic of convincing entertainers, musicians and other celebrities with millions of social media followers to be involved in conservation campaigns — or just be seen with a pangolin.
Nigeria is home to three of the four African pangolin species, but they are not well known among the country’s 240 million people.
Ofua’s drive for pangolin publicity stems from an encounter with a group of well-dressed young men while he was once transporting pangolins he had rescued in a cage. The men pointed at them and asked him what they were, Ofua said.
“Oh, those are baby dragons,” he joked. But it got him thinking.
“There is a dark side to that admission,” Ofua said. “If people do not even know what a pangolin looks like, how do you protect them?”
