Hindu woman groomed and exploited by Muslim man who concealed his religious identity and induced her into physical relations under false promises of marriage

Case ID : 30a750d | Location : Bengaluru, Karnataka, India | Date of Incident : Fri, 20 March, 2026

Case ID : 30a750d

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

20 March, 2026

Hindu woman groomed and exploited by Muslim man who concealed his religious identity and induced her into physical relations under false promises of marriage

Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes

Man pretends to be Hindu

Name Changed

Brainwashed and/or groomed

Victim says she was brainwashed/groomed

Case Summary

A 25-year-old Hindu woman from Bengaluru was deceived into a relationship by a Muslim man named Ayub Akram, aged 30, a resident of Kodungaiyur, Chennai. The accused concealed his Muslim identity and his existing marriage, made false promises of marriage, induced her into physical relations on multiple occasions, and subsequently abandoned her after she became pregnant and suffered a miscarriage. Ayub Akram was arrested by the Thousand Lights All Women Police Station, produced before a Magistrate Court, and remanded in judicial custody. According to reports, the Hindu woman met Ayub Akram at a friend's marriage engagement ceremony in Chennai in 2025. Akram made no disclosure of his Muslim identity or his existing marriage and cultivated a friendship with the Hindu woman by exchanging social media handles and mobile numbers and maintaining regular contact on social media platforms. The Hindu woman's personal circumstances made her particularly vulnerable to Akram's deception. Following her mother's death, her father remarried, leaving her to live under the care of her grandmother in Bengaluru, isolated from immediate parental support and protection. Taking advantage of this vulnerability, Akram cultivated the friendship into a romantic relationship over time, making repeated false promises that he would marry her. Believing his assurances, the Hindu woman had physical and intimate relations with Akram on several occasions at a lodge in Nungambakkam, Chennai, as a result of which she became pregnant. When she informed Akram of the pregnancy, he discussed their marriage and sent her back to Bengaluru. Upon returning to Bengaluru, the Hindu woman experienced severe abdominal pain and was admitted to the hospital, where doctors informed her that she had suffered a miscarriage. When she confronted Akram about the situation, she discovered for the first time that he had been married throughout their relationship and had deliberately concealed this fact from her. Akram then began ignoring her calls and issuing threats against her. The Hindu woman filed a complaint at the Thousand Lights All Women Police Station in Chennai after realising the full extent of the deception and abandonment she had been subjected to. Police arrested Akram, produced him before a Magistrate's Court, and he was remanded in judicial custody.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

The primary category for this case is "Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes". The sub-category for this case 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. Another sub-category for this case is "Brainwashed and/or groomed". The tertiary category here is "Victim says she was brainwashed/groomed". In our database, we have not added incidents where women have converted to another religion of their free will and no allegations of forced/involuntary conversion have been made. However, there are certain cases of conversion where the consent itself is a result of the brainwashing or grooming of a minor by the non-Hindu perpetrator trying to victimise a woman for her Hindu religious identity. The phenomenon of grooming points to non-Hindu perpetrators identifying their Hindu victims’ vulnerabilities and exploiting them over months and sometimes years, to extract the supposed ‘consent’ in order to convert their religion. In most cases of grooming, the victims are minors or the grooming started when the victim was a minor. In other cases of grooming, the non-Hindu perpetrator brainwashes and grooms a minor victim to extract their trust and then proceeds to rape them repeatedly with the intent of converting them to their faith. It is pertinent to understand here that when the victim is a minor, the ‘consent’ to convert or enter into a romantic relationship with an adult itself is redundant – addressed by POCSO. While every case of conversion of a minor and incidents of establishing a physical relationship with a minor by an adult is a crime, for the purpose of this database, a case would be considered a hate crime only if there is a distinct religious angle to the grooming. For example, in the UK, if a Hindu minor is targeted by Pakistani grooming gangs, it would be considered a hate crime because the victims are specifically targeted owing to their non-Muslim religious identity with the perpetrators being Muslim. In other cases, if a Hindu minor is brainwashed into entering a physical relationship with the non-Hindu adult perpetrator and the family alleges grooming/brainwashing of the minor to convert her religion, it would form a part of this database. If the victim is a Hindu adult, the case would form a part of this database only if the victim herself says that she was brainwashed/groomed to convert her religion. However, if the victim is deceased (murdered or otherwise), the case would form a part of this database if her family/friends provided testimony that the victim was brainwashed/groomed to convert her religion. Since these crimes have a distinct religious angle where the victim is being targeted owing to her Hindu religious identity, these cases are considered a hate crime. This case qualified as a hate crime on the basis that Ayub Akram, a Muslim man from Kodungaiyur, Chennai, deliberately concealed his Muslim identity and his existing marriage to enter into a sustained relationship with a 25-year-old Hindu woman from Bengaluru, systematically grooming her through false promises of marriage, inducing her into physical relations under false pretences, and abandoning her after she became pregnant and suffered a miscarriage. The deliberate concealment of his Muslim identity was not incidental to the relationship but its foundational deception, without which the Hindu woman would never have entered into the relationship or consented to physical intimacy with him. Ayub Akram presented himself to the Hindu woman without any disclosure of his Muslim identity, allowing her to engage with him under the assumption that he was a man she could trust and potentially marry. In Hindu society, religious identity carries profound significance in the context of romantic relationships and marriage, shaping a woman's willingness to enter into intimacy and commitment with a man. By concealing his Muslim identity, Akram deliberately bypassed the Hindu woman's faith-based boundaries, exploiting the trust she extended to him on the false assumption of a shared or compatible social and religious background. The concealment was not a passive omission but an active and sustained deception maintained throughout the entirety of the relationship, compounded further by the deliberate concealment of his existing marriage, which rendered his promises of marriage to the Hindu woman entirely fraudulent from the outset. The grooming process carried out by Akram was systematic and calculated. He identified the Hindu woman at a social gathering, exchanged contact details, cultivated the relationship gradually through sustained social media communication, and exploited her personal vulnerability, having lost her mother, been separated from her father through his remarriage, and left in the care of her elderly grandmother in Bengaluru, to draw her into a state of emotional dependency and trust. The victim herself confirmed through her complaint that she had believed Akram's promises completely, entering into physical relations with him on multiple occasions at a lodge in Nungambakkam in full trust of his false assurances of marriage. The extent of the grooming was reflected in the victim's complete unawareness of Akram's Muslim identity and existing marriage throughout the entire period of the relationship, confirming that the deception had been maintained with deliberate and sustained care. The Hindu woman's discovery of Akram's true identity came only after she had suffered a miscarriage, confronted him about her pregnancy, and found herself ignored and threatened. By this point, the harm inflicted upon her, physical, psychological, and emotional, was irreversible. The name under which Akram had presented himself throughout the relationship had served as the instrument through which her trust had been cultivated, her physical autonomy violated, and her future plans destroyed. The deliberate assumption of a non-Muslim identity to facilitate the exploitation of a Hindu woman confirmed the religiously motivated nature of the deception and the harm it caused. Given that this case met the parameters of a religiously motivated hate crime, it was added to the hate crime database of the Hinduphobia tracker. Disclaimer: The Hinduphobia Tracker records incident dates based on when a crime occurred, or a victim's ordeal began, rather than when the media reported it. In this case, the exact date on which Ayub Akram began grooming the Hindu victim at the marriage engagement ceremony in Chennai is not confirmed in the sources. However, the sources confirm that the two met at a friend's wedding ceremony in 2025. Therefore, March 19, 2025, has been chosen as the indicative incident date, with March 19 being the publication date of the article and 2025 being the confirmed year in which the victim's ordeal began. This was recorded for documentation purposes only.