Hindu woman abducted by Muslim man in Lucknow held hostage for five years raped repeatedly and pressured to convert to Islam

Case ID : 30a8bca | Location : Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India | Date of Incident : Mon, 29 March, 2021

Case ID : 30a8bca

Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India

29 March, 2021

Hindu woman abducted by Muslim man in Lucknow held hostage for five years raped repeatedly and pressured to convert to Islam

Predatory Proselytisation

Harassment, threats, coercion for conversion

Case Summary

A Hindu woman from Sairpur police station area, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, was abducted, held hostage at multiple locations for five years, repeatedly raped, subjected to sustained conversion pressure, and threatened with death by Manzoor Ali, a Muslim military serviceman from Mahangukhedha, Lakhimpur Kheri district. She was rescued after managing to contact her father through a neighbour's help. An FIR was registered on 30 May 2026 and Manzoor Ali was arrested. As per details, the victim was married and residing in Sitapur district. In March 2021 she came to her maternal home in Sairpur, Lucknow. Manzoor Ali administered an intoxicating substance to her late at night and abducted her. He then held her hostage at multiple locations across five years, repeatedly raping her and moving her from place to place specifically to prevent her from contacting anyone. Throughout her captivity he subjected her to sustained pressure to convert from Hinduism to Islam. When she resisted, he threatened and intimidated her. When Manzoor Ali went on military duty, he left the victim in the custody of his brother Kamal and relative Salman. Both kept her hidden and threatened to kill her, preventing any contact with the outside world. A few days before the complaint, the victim managed to contact her father by phone with the help of a neighbour. Her father reached the given address and took her back to his home in Sairpur. The family then contacted police and filed a complaint. An FIR was registered on 30 May 2026 against Manzoor Ali, Kamal, and Salman. Manzoor Ali was arrested on Monday. The roles of Kamal and Salman were under investigation at the time of publication.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

The primary category for this case is "Predatory Proselytisation". The sub-category for this case is "Harassment, threat, 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. The clearest religious marker in this case was the sustained effort to force the victim to abandon her Hindu faith and convert to Islam, with abduction, prolonged confinement, and rape being used as tools to achieve that objective. The conversion pressure was not incidental to the abuse but one of its central objectives. Throughout the five years she remained in captivity, she was repeatedly subjected to demands that she convert. This demonstrates that the perpetrators were not merely seeking to control the victim physically. They sought to break her attachment to her Hindu identity and compel her religious submission. The abduction itself appears to have been carefully planned to achieve this objective. Manzoor Ali administered an intoxicating substance to the Hindu woman and removed her from her home, family, and support system. By isolating her from everyone who could protect her, he created conditions in which sustained conversion pressure could be applied without interruption. The captivity was therefore not separate from the objective of conversion. It was the means through which that objective could be pursued and enforced. Another critical religious marker was the way rape was weaponised to facilitate the conversion demands. The repeated rapes were not merely acts of sexual violence. They were used as instruments of domination designed to break the victim's will, destroy her sense of autonomy, and leave her psychologically vulnerable. Rape was weaponised as a means of overcoming resistance and forcing submission to the conversion demands. The victim was subjected to years of sexual violence while simultaneously being pressured to abandon her Hindu faith, demonstrating that the assaults and the conversion pressure formed part of the same coercive process. The objective was to shatter her ability to resist the sustained effort to erase her Hindu identity. The death threats issued whenever the victim resisted conversion further establish the religious character of the crime. Refusal to abandon her faith was met with threats to her life. This demonstrates that conversion was not being presented as a matter of personal choice but was being enforced through fear, violence, and intimidation. The victim was placed in a position where remaining Hindu carried severe consequences, while compliance with the perpetrators' demands was presented as the only path to survival. The prolonged nature of the captivity is also significant because it demonstrates the extraordinary lengths to which the perpetrators were willing to go in pursuit of their objective. For five years, the victim remained under their control, cut off from her family and deprived of any meaningful opportunity to escape. Such sustained confinement cannot be separated from the conversion pressure that accompanied it. The captivity provided the environment in which the victim could be repeatedly assaulted, threatened, and pressured until her resistance was broken. The objective extended far beyond physical domination. The perpetrators sought to destroy both the victim's bodily autonomy and her attachment to her Hindu faith. The repeated conversion demands, enforced through years of captivity, rape, intimidation, and death threats, demonstrate that her Hindu identity was not incidental to the abuse but one of its central targets. The victim was not merely expected to submit to her captors. She was expected to abandon her faith as the price of survival. This combination of abduction, sexual violence, coercion, and sustained pressure to renounce Hinduism establishes the religiously motivated nature of the crime. For this reason, the case qualifies as a hate crime and has been included in the tracker. Disclaimer: The exact date of the abduction in March 2021 was not confirmed in the source. The tracker records incident dates based on when the crime occurred rather than when it was reported or published. The source confirms the abduction occurred in March 2021 and that the FIR was registered on 30 May 2026. In this case, therefore, 30 March 2021 has been used as the indicative incident date since no specific date within March 2021 was confirmed in the source. This date has been recorded for documentation purposes only.