Hindu minor held captive through blackmail and gang rape for one and a half years as Muslim youth demands conversion
Baghpat, Uttar Pradesh, India 
8 May, 2026
Case Summary
A Hindu girl, a 10th-class student from a village in Bagpat district, Uttar Pradesh, was gang raped for approximately one and a half years and forced to convert by Arif, a Muslim youth from her village, and his two companions. The abuse was sustained through blackmail. Approximately one and a half years prior to the complaint, Arif created a fabricated obscene video of the victim and used the threat of making it viral to maintain control over her and silence her. Throughout the period of abuse, Arif also pressured the victim to convert from Hinduism to Islam and conduct a nikah [Islamic marriage ceremony]. Fear of the video being made viral and threats against her family prevented the victim from disclosing the abuse to her family for the entire duration. On 14 January, as the victim was walking to school, Arif arrived in a vehicle and attempted to forcibly make her sit in the car. When she resisted, Arif threatened to make the obscene video viral and to kill her brother. Frightened by the threats, the victim sat in the car. Arif then demanded that she convert her religion and conduct a nikah. The victim raised an alarm, upon which Arif got her out of the car and fled. The victim returned home and, for the first time, disclosed the entire course of conduct to her family. She told them that Arif had been following her with his companions from her home to school every day, standing near the house as she left and pursuing her the entire four-kilometre route. The victim's father filed a complaint with the police. An FIR [First Information Report] was registered against Arif and his two companions. Superintendent of Police Suraj Kumar Rai confirmed that Arif was arrested, produced in court, and sent to jail. The victim's medical examination was conducted. City Kotwali In-charge Brijesh Kumar confirmed the arrest and judicial proceedings. Police raided multiple locations in search of the two remaining accused but they had not been apprehended at the time of publication.
Why it is Hate Crime ?
The primary category for this case is "Predatory Proselytisation". The sub-category here is "Harassment, threats, coercion for conversion". 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. 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. Another sub-category for this case is "Proselytisation by grooming, brainwashing, manipulation and subtle indoctrination". The tertiary categories here are "Rape and sexual assault" and "Conversion of minor". Religious brainwashing essentially means the often subtle and forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up their religious beliefs to accept contrasting regimented ideas. Religious grooming or brainwashing also involves propaganda and manipulation. It involves the systematic effort, driven by religious malice and indoctrination, to persuade “non-believers’ to accept allegiance, command, or doctrine to and of a contrasting faith. Cases of such grooming or brainwashing are far more nuanced than direct threats, coercion, inducement and violence. In such cases, it is often seen that there is repeated, subtle and continual manipulation of the victim to induce disaffection towards their own faith and acceptance of the contrasting faith of the perpetrator. While subtle indoctrination is widely acknowledged as predatory, an element which is often understated in such conversions or the attempts of such conversion is the role of loyalty and trust which might develop between the perpetrator and the victim. Fiduciary relationships are often abused to affect such religious conversion. For example, an educator transmitting religious doctrine of a competing faith to a Hindu student. The Hindu student is likely to accept what the teacher is transmitting owing to existence of the fiduciary relationship. The exploitation of the fiduciary relationship to religiously indoctrinate victims would also be included in this category. Since the underlying animosity towards the victim’s faith forms the basis of predatory proselytization, such cases are considered religiously motivated hate crimes. Arif's conduct toward the Hindu minor was not a spontaneous act of violence. It was a sustained and methodical operation that began with the creation of a blackmail instrument and ended with an attempted forced conversion and nikah. The fabricated obscene video created approximately one and a half years before the complaint was not a by-product of the abuse. It was its foundation. By creating a video that could be deployed as a threat at any moment, Arif established a condition of permanent vulnerability over the victim that made sustained gang rape, conversion pressure, and daily surveillance possible without the victim being able to seek help or disclose the abuse. The daily surveillance of the victim's route to school reflects the degree of operational control Arif maintained over her movements. He and his companions positioned themselves near her home each morning and followed her the entire four-kilometre route to school. This was not random harassment. It was a structured monitoring operation designed to maintain physical proximity to the victim, reinforce her awareness of his presence and power, and prevent her from developing any sense of safety or freedom from his reach. The daily surveillance served the same function as the blackmail video: it was an instrument of psychological dominance that kept the victim in a condition of sustained fear and compliance. The gang rape conducted by Arif and his two companions over one and a half years was enabled entirely by the blackmail framework. Each act of rape was a demonstration of the power the fabricated video gave Arif over the victim. The involvement of two additional companions in the gang rape establishes that the operation extended beyond Arif as an individual to a coordinated group that collectively exploited the Hindu minor under the protection of the blackmail threat. The group's confidence in conducting repeated gang rape of a minor over an extended period without fear of disclosure reflects the effectiveness of the blackmail instrument in maintaining the victim's silence. The conversion demand and nikah proposal issued by Arif on 14 January establish the religious objective that had underlain the entire course of conduct. The sustained gang rape, the daily surveillance, and the blackmail were not ends in themselves. They were instruments of control deployed to create a condition in which the victim would have no choice but to comply with conversion and nikah. The conversion demand was not introduced at the end of the operation as an afterthought. It was the terminal objective toward which the entire operation had been directed from the beginning. The death threat against the victim's brother issued on 14 January reflects the escalation of coercion at the point when Arif attempted to complete the conversion and nikah. When the victim resisted being forcibly placed in the car, Arif deployed the most extreme available threat against her family to overcome her resistance. The willingness to threaten a family member's life in order to secure compliance with a conversion demand establishes the degree to which Arif was prepared to use lethal violence as an instrument of religious coercion. It is further important to note here that the victim was a minor, which means the element of consent and genuine change of conscience was missing ab initio. Minors, due to their young age and lack of maturity, are particularly vulnerable to manipulation and coercion. They may not have the ability to fully understand the implications of converting to another religion and the Muslim perpetrator purposely targeted and exploited this vulnerability of the victim. Since this case exemplifies the use of coercion and manipulation to achieve religious conversion, it is a blatant act of religious hate, which is why it has been documented here in the hate tracker. Given that this case met the parameters of a religiously motivated hate crime, Arif's conduct reflected more than sexual predation or criminal exploitation. By creating a blackmail instrument to silence a Hindu minor, conducting sustained gang rape with two companions over one and a half years, maintaining daily surveillance of her movements, issuing death threats against her family, and demanding conversion and nikah as the terminal objective of the entire operation, his actions demonstrated a deliberate and structured campaign to destroy a Hindu minor's religious identity, bodily autonomy, and family safety simultaneously. The victim was targeted specifically because she was Hindu, and every instrument of the operation, being fabricated blackmail, gang rape, surveillance, death threats, and conversion demands, was chosen because it would be most effective in compelling a Hindu minor to abandon her faith under conditions of total psychological and physical subjugation. This reflects an underlying hostility toward Hindu religious identity that cannot be characterised as anything other than religiously motivated. Given that this case met the parameters of a religiously motivated hate crime, it was added to the hate crime database of the tracker. Disclaimer: The Hinduphobia Tracker records incident dates based on when the crime occurred rather than when it was reported or published. This case involved a sustained course of conduct spanning approximately one and a half years prior to the complaint. 14 January 2026 has been used as the primary incident date, reflecting the most acute confirmed act of attempted abduction, conversion demand, and death threats against the victim's brother. The sustained gang rape and blackmail commenced approximately one and a half years prior to this date. This was recorded for documentation purposes only.
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 1
- Adult 0
- Senior Citizen 0
- Unknown 0
Case Status
Arrested
Perpetrators Details
Perpetrators
Muslim Extremists
Perpetrators Range
From 2 To 5
Perpetrators Gender
male
Sources 
