Salman guises as Suraj Jain to trap Hindu girl, rapes and tortures her, forces to convert to Islam

Case ID : 0b66ee4 | Location : Agar, Madhya Pradesh, India | Date of Incident : Sat, 27 January, 2024

Case ID : 0b66ee4

Agar, Madhya Pradesh, India

27 January, 2024

Salman guises as Suraj Jain to trap Hindu girl, rapes and tortures her, forces to convert to Islam

Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes

Man pretends to be Hindu

Name Changed

Assault or threat upon refusal to convert

Case Summary

Salman Lala from Agar, Madhya Pradesh, raped a girl from Rajasthan while hiding his religion. Pretending to be Suraj Jain, he established a relationship with her and promised marriage. On January 28, 2024, he brought her to Agar, where she discovered his true identity upon seeing a woman in a burqa at his house. Salman, along with his sister and another youth, Sameer, then forced the girl to convert to Islam. When she refused, they beat her and branded her with a hot iron rod, erasing a tattoo of Khatu Shyam Ji's peacock feather on her hand. The victim, who lived with her paralyzed maternal grandfather in Kota district, managed to escape and reported the ordeal to the police. The police registered a case against Salman, his sister, and Sameer. They confirmed that the victim was initially in Jhalawar for her grandfather’s treatment when she met Salman, who deceived her with a false identity.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

Two distinct elements in this particular case demonstrate that the Muslim perpetrator committed the crime while harbouring a bias against the Hindu faith. The first factor is that the accused pretended to be a Hindu to deceive her, which is why the first sub-category under the core category 'hate crime against woman in relationship', selected here is, 'Man pretends to be Hindu'. 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. The second component in this case which makes it worthy of being documented as a religiously motivated hate crime is that the Muslim accused assaulted the Hindu victim after she refused to convert to Islam. This is why the second sub-category under which this case has been listed is, 'assault or threat upon refusal to convert'. When Hindu women are in a relationship with non-Hindu men, there are cases where the woman faces threats or assault after she refuses to convert and change her religious identity owing to pressure/force by the non-Hindu man. Such relationships may be consensual with the religious identity of the non-Hindu man known to the victim. Somewhere along the relationship, the non-Hindu man starts pressurizing the Hindu woman to convert to Islam and upon her refusal, assaults or threatens the victim. Such cases are driven by specific religious motivations and against the religious identity of the victim and are therefore qualified as hate crimes. Cases where the Hindu woman converts to Islam and does not file a complaint about the force or threat, are not considered a part of the hate tracker, even though, it may be argued that the woman was brainwashed or threatened to convert to Islam. The victim in the case was a Hindu woman. The Muslim man specifically targeted the woman based on her religion as evidenced by the fact that he pretended to be a Hindu to deceive her. Thereafter, the religious motive of the crime became more apparent when he and his family members began forcing the victim to marry him per Islamic rituals. The intrinsic hate that the perpetrator harboured against the victim's faith became far more evident when he branded her with a hot iron rod, erasing a tattoo of Khatu Shyam Ji's peacock feather on her hand. Khatu Shyam Baba is a manifestation of Lord Krishna, one of the most revered gods in Hinduism. Since the motivating factor of the crime was the religious identity of the victims and the accused employed violence and intimidation to disenfranchise the victim from it, the case has been included in the hate tracker.