Syed Abdul Alim Jafri pretends to be Hindu, drugs and sexually assaults married Hindu woman, forces her to convert to Islam and marry him
Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India 
30 January, 2024
Case Summary
In Lucknow, Syed Abdul Alim Jafri, an engineer, was arrested for drugging, raping, and pressuring a Hindu woman to convert to Islam and marry him. The victim met Jafri, who posed as Nihal, on Facebook in 2020. After luring her to meet, he incapacitated her with drugs, sexually assaulted her, and recorded the act. Jafri then repeatedly abused her, demanding she convert to Islam and marry him, threatening to release the explicit video if she refused. The victim reported that Jafri gave her gifts and took her to mosques and madrasas, forcing her to pray. Despite moving to a different house in Ghazipur, Jafri tracked her down, continuing his harassment and threats. Eventually, the distressed woman reported him to the police. Jafri was employed by a private software company in Noida.
Why it is Hate Crime ?
This case has been categorised as a religious hate crime where harassment, threat and coercion were deployed for trying to convert a Hindu woman to Islam. Harassment covers a wide range of behaviours of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behaviour that demeans, humiliates, and intimidates a person, including threats and coercion. Harassment and threats, in this case, find their root on discriminatory grounds which has the effect of nullifying a person’s rights or infringing upon his freedom to exercise his right specifically owing to the victim’s religious identity. Verbal and physical threats and psychological or physical harassment are often used against Hindu victims because they choose to practice their professed religion. Religious harassment also includes forced and involuntary conversions by harassment, threats or coercion. Coercion includes intimidatory tactics like force-feeding a Hindu victim beef to convert to another religion, forceful circumcision etc. In several cases documented, non-Hindu perpetrators or those who harbour specific animosity towards Hinduism, harass victims simply based on their religious identity. Such cases often also include harassment to ensure the Hindu victim abandons his/her professed religion and adopts the religion of the perpetrator. In this subcategory, we would only include cases where the victim was harassed, threatened or coerced to convert. Cases where attempts were made to convert but the victim resisted would be documented in another sub-category. Such cases where Hindu victims are harassed to convert to the perpetrator’s religion are rooted in animosity towards the victim’s religious identity and are therefore documented as religiously motivated hate crimes. The distinct element in this particular case that demonstrates that the Muslim perpetrator committed the crime while harbouring a bias against the Hindu faith is that he hid his religious identity to deceive the victim. He employed violence and blackmailing with the sole aim of disenfranchising the victim from her faith, because of which this case has been included under the sub-category 'Harassment, threats, coercion for conversion' within the core category of 'predatory proselytisation'. This case has been categorised as a religious hate crime under the 'hate crimes against women in relationship and sexual crimes'. When a non-Hindu man pretends to be a Hindu to deceive a Hindu woman into a relationship, the act is seen as triggered by malafide intentions. In some cases, the woman eventually accepts the man’s original religious identity and converts after the man’s identity is revealed. These cases could be argued as cases of religious brainwashing and a result of the pressure a woman feels after getting into a relationship with a man. The woman, it can be argued, also changed her religious identity because of the stigma she believes she might face if she chooses to walk out of a deceptive relationship. However, for the purpose of documenting hate crimes, the cases in this subcategory are limited to those where there is explicit violence aimed at religious conversion against the wishes of the victim (force-feeding beef, blackmailing with intimate videos, rape on refusal to convert, etc), or if the woman herself complains of the man’s religious deception. In such cases, it is established that the deception of the non-Hindu man had a specific aim of religious conversion or targeting of the victim due to her Hindu religious identity, therefore, making it a religiously motivated hate crime. Further, in such cases, a non-Hindu man is in a relationship with a Hindu woman when the pressure to convert her religion begins to manifest. The relationship in such cases is mostly consensual and the religious identity of the perpetrator is known to the Hindu woman in the relationship, however, at some point during the relationship, the non-Hindu man starts to force the victim to convert her religion and give up her Hindu religious identity. In such cases, the methods used to force the victim to convert her religion often revolve around force-feeding beef, forcing her to wear hijab, forcing her to read the Kalma or even pressurizing the victim to do ‘Nikah’, which is marriage under Islamic law, with a prerequisite being conversion to Islam. Cases where a Hindu woman consensually converts to Islam in a relationship will be left out of the hate crime database, even though it could be argued in several cases that the conversion was a result of religious brainwashing.
Victim Details
Total Victim
1
Deceased
0
Gender
- Male 0
- Female 1
- Third Gender 0
- Unknown 0
Caste
- SC/ST 0
- OBC 0
- General 0
- Unknown 1
Age Group
- Minor 0
- Adult 0
- Senior Citizen 0
- Unknown 1
Case Status
Complaint registered
Perpetrators Details
Perpetrators
Muslim Extremists
Perpetrators Range
One Person
Perpetrators Gender
male
Sources 
