Hindu Dalit woman financially entrapped and pressured to renounce Hindu gods and adopt Christianity in Jabalpur

Case ID : 30a8c13 | Location : Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India | Date of Incident : Mon, 1 June, 2026

Case ID : 30a8c13

Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India

1 June, 2026

Hindu Dalit woman financially entrapped and pressured to renounce Hindu gods and adopt Christianity in Jabalpur

Predatory Proselytisation

Conversion/ attempts to convert by inducement

Harassment, threats, coercion for conversion

Proselytisation by grooming, brainwashing, manipulation or subtle indoctrination

Case Summary

In Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, a Hindu woman from the Scheduled Caste community was targeted through financial inducement, followed by sustained conversion pressure and mental torture. Three Christian men explicitly demanded she abandon her Hindu gods and goddesses and convert to Christianity. The victim, Sapna Malik, wife of Arvind Malik and a resident of Hiltnaganj in the Cantt police station area of Jabalpur. She worked as a domestic maid at different houses in the area. Three Christian individuals in her vicinity first approached her with financial assistance. Given her occupation and economic position, she accepted their help. Thereafter, the Christian men demanded that she change her religion and convert to Christianity. They pressured her to start worshipping the Christian God and leave her Hindu gods and goddesses. Sapna Malik stated, "They asked me to leave my Kuldevi (ancestral deity)." The pressure was sustained over a period of time and was accompanied by mental torture and conduct that deliberately injured her religious faith and sentiments. The victim then approached the police but found the local response inadequate given the seriousness of the conduct. She then submitted a written application to Additional Superintendent of Police Suryakant Sharma. In her application, she demanded that non-bailable sections be added to the case and that the accused be arrested immediately. She stated that her personal liberty and religious faith had been affected and that she had suffered deep mental injury as a result of what the accused had done. The complaint was filed under the provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. As of the date of reporting, no FIR had been confirmed as registered, and no arrests had been made. The investigation into the matter was ongoing.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

The primary category selected in this case is: Predatory Proselytisation. The subcategory selected is: Conversion/ attempts to convert by inducement. Predatory Proselytisation is not just limited to threat, harassment, force and violence, but it also has contours of stealth. In several cases, the Hindu victim is exploited to convert, with non-Hindus taking advantage of their poverty. In such cases, the Hindu victim who is suffering financially is offered monetary benefits, including lucrative offers for jobs, health treatment, education, etc, to induce the victim into changing his/her religion. In such cases, the religious identity of the victim and the aim to disenfranchise him from his faith form the heart of the crime. Also, taking advantage of and exploiting an individual’s economic vulnerabilities is widely acknowledged as exploitation, forms of which are often penalised by law. Such cases, therefore, are considered religiously motivated hate crimes since the victim’s religious identity forms the very heart of the crime itself. The other subcategory under this is - Harassments, 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. The other subcategory selected is: Proselytisation by grooming, brainwashing, manipulation or subtle indoctrination. 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 the 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 proselytisation, such cases are considered religiously motivated hate crimes. This case was included in the Hinduphobia Tracker because it involved a deliberate and calculated attempt to convert a Hindu woman to Christianity through financial manipulation and sustained psychological pressure. The facts indicated that the accused were actively working to draw a Hindu woman away from her religion and bring her into the folds of Christianity. The method chosen by the accused was significant. Rather than approaching Sapna Malik with religion first, they approached her with money. She was a domestic worker with limited economic means, and the financial assistance offered to her was accepted in good faith. What the accused established through that assistance, however, was not a relationship of goodwill but one of dependency, and it was inside that dependency that the conversion demands were eventually placed. The economic vulnerability was not incidental to the plan. Once that access was secured, the accused demanded that she abandon her Hindu Gods and Goddesses and begin worshipping the Christian God instead. The demand was not for addition but for substitution. She was not being invited to explore another faith alongside her own. She was being told to leave hers entirely. Further, the specific demand that she leave her Kuldevi made the depth of that intention clear. The Kuldevi is the presiding ancestral Deity of a Hindu family's lineage, passed down through generations as the spiritual guardian of the family. To demand its abandonment was to demand that she sever her family's most sacred continuity. That was not a casual religious suggestion. It was a demand for the erasure of her Hindu identity at its deepest root. The sustained mental pressure and torture that followed served a purpose distinct from the initial inducement. When financial dependency alone proved insufficient to secure compliance, psychological coercion became the enforcement mechanism. Together, the two stages reflected a structured method: access through money, compliance through pressure. This was the architecture of grooming-based proselytisation, in which trust and dependence were built first, and the scope for refusal was forcibly narrowed. The religious motivation in this case is evident from the fact that the accused did not merely offer assistance or attempt to introduce the victim to their faith. Their objective was the abandonment of her existing Hindu identity and its replacement with Christianity. The repeated insistence that she stop worshipping Hindu deities and renounce her Kuldevi demonstrates that the accused viewed her continued adherence to Hinduism as an obstacle to be overcome. This reflects a mindset in which the victim's faith was not respected as a legitimate religious choice but treated as something that needed to be discarded and replaced. Moreover, this stems from inherent hostility towards the victim's professed faith since Abrahamic faiths believe that any non-adherent to the faith is subject to being dehumanised till they convert. Since such predatory actions stem from doctrinal animosity towards the Hindu faith and its adherents, this case is being documented as a religiously motivated hate crime. Disclaimer: The Hinduphobia Tracker records incident dates based on when the victim's ordeal began, rather than when the media reported it. In this case, the report does not mention when the victim's ordeal began; therefore, the date when the report was published has been recorded as the indicative incident date for documentation purposes.