Hindu woman lured into relationship, subjected to harassment and acid attack threats by Muslim man posing as Hindu in Guwahati

Case ID : 30a86e2 | Location : Guwahati, Assam, India | Date of Incident : Wed, 17 May, 2023

Case ID : 30a86e2

Guwahati, Assam, India

17 May, 2023

Hindu woman lured into relationship, subjected to harassment and acid attack threats by Muslim man posing as Hindu in Guwahati

Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes

Man pretends to be Hindu

Name Changed

Case Summary

In Assam's Guwahati, a Hindu woman was lured into a relationship by a Muslim man named Mohammad Sajid, who had pretended to be a Hindu in order to deceive her. After the victim discovered his true identity, she was subjected to harassment and acid attack threats by the accused. According to reports, the accused initially introduced himself to the young Hindu woman as “Sanju” in order to conceal his religious identity, gain her trust, and enter into a romantic relationship with her. In 2023, the victim discovered that his real identity was Mohammad Sajid and that he was a Muslim. Following this discovery, she immediately severed all ties with him and ended the relationship. According to the victim, after the breakup, Sajid persistently subjected her to physical and mental harassment in various ways. The situation later escalated further when he attempted to force himself on her and also threatened her with an acid attack. Subsequently, the woman lodged a complaint at Pan Bazar Women’s Police Station. Following the complaint, police tracked down Mohammad Sajid in the Kumarpara area of Guwahati and arrested him.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

This case is added to the tracker under the primary category- Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes. The subcategory selected 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. 4 In this case, a Hindu woman was lured into a relationship by a Muslim man named Mohammad Sajid, who had pretended to be a Hindu in order to deceive her. After the victim discovered his true identity, she was subjected to harassment and acid attack threats by the accused. First, the perpetrator’s act of deception by posing as a Hindu demonstrated clear bias and malicious intent towards the victim’s religion. By introducing himself as “Sanju” and concealing his real identity as Mohammad Sajid, the accused manipulated the Hindu woman’s trust and entered into a relationship with her under false pretences. This deception was not incidental but a deliberate attempt to target the victim while hiding his religious identity, thereby violating her right to make an informed decision regarding whom she chose to be in a relationship with. The accused’s calculated concealment of his identity strongly underscored the religious motive behind the crime. In such instances, identity concealment is not merely a personal deception but a calculated strategy rooted in religious targeting and profiling. The accused was aware that the victim, being Hindu, may not have consented to the relationship had she known his real identity from the outset. He therefore circumvented her ability to exercise informed choice by deliberately lying about his name and religious background. This demonstrated a premeditated effort to exploit the victim specifically on the basis of her religious identity. The religiously motivated nature of the crime became even more evident after the victim discovered his true identity and ended the relationship. Following the breakup, the accused persistently subjected her to physical and mental harassment, attempted to force himself on her, and threatened her with an acid attack. Such intimidation and violent threats after the exposure of his deception highlighted the coercive nature of the relationship and reflected deep hostility towards the victim for rejecting him after learning his real identity. This case reflected a broader pattern in which Hindu women are specifically targeted through false identities by Muslim men. Such deliberate victimisation based on religion demonstrated a fundamental disregard for the religious beliefs and autonomy of Hindu women. The calculated concealment of identity, followed by harassment, coercion, and acid attack threats, made this a clear instance of a religiously motivated hate crime directed against a Hindu woman. This case is not an isolated incident of religiously motivated targeting of Hindu women by Muslim men posing as Hindus. The Hinduphobia Tracker documented over 1,140 cases between January 2023 and 18 May 2026 in which Hindu women were targeted in interfaith relationships by non-Hindu men, particularly Muslims. In these cases, the perpetrators subjected the victims to forced religious conversion, sexual exploitation, physical abuse, threats, blackmail, or sustained religious harassment after entering into a relationship or marriage with them. Significantly, in over 720 of these documented cases, the accused had concealed their religious identity and posed as Hindus in order to gain the trust of Hindu women and initiate relationships with them under false pretences. This recurring pattern of deception demonstrated a systematic form of religious targeting in which Hindu women were specifically profiled and exploited by concealing religious identity to bypass informed consent and familial or religious objections. Some examples of such cases include an incident in Bahadarabad, Haridwar district, Uttarakhand, where a Hindu woman was blackmailed and raped by a Muslim man named Iqbal, who had posed as a Hindu in order to entrap her. In another case from Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, a Hindu woman was deceived and sexually exploited by a Muslim man named Sufian, who had impersonated a Hindu man on social media to lure her into a relationship. Similarly, in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, a Hindu woman, who was the mother of a six-year-old child, was deceived, forcibly converted to Islam, and kept in captivity by a Muslim man named Ehsan Hussain. The accused had posed as a Hindu and trapped her in a fabricated romantic relationship before coercing her to abandon her faith, renaming her Khushboo Khatun, forcibly marrying her, and later relocating her to Chennai. Given that this case meets the parameters of a hate-driven offence, it is being added to the hate crime database of the Hinduphobia Tracker. Disclaimer: The Hinduphobia Tracker records incident dates based on when the victim’s ordeal began, rather than when it is reported by the media. However, in this case, the exact date on which the victim’s ordeal commenced was not specified in media reports. The only timeline mentioned was that, in 2023, the victim discovered that the accused’s real identity was Muslim. As the media reports concerning this incident were published on 18 May 2026, and no precise date from 2023 was provided, an indicative incident date of 18 May 2023 has been conservatively selected by the Hinduphobia Tracker for documentation purposes.