Minor Hindu girl lured, groomed and brainwashed to convert by Muslim man in West Bengal; accused also planned to sell her into prostitution
Siliguri, West Bengal, India 
14 July, 2024
Case Summary
In Siliguri, West Bengal, a 17-year-old Hindu girl was lured into a relationship by a Muslim man, Mohammad Shahil. The accused groomed her under the pretext of marriage, abducted her from her home, and forced her to convert to Islam through the use of brainwashing and manipulation. He also planned to sell her into a prostitution racket at a red-light area in Islampur. According to media reports, the incident came to light when the victim was 19 years old. She was spotted by Hindu activists roaming with the Muslim man inside the court premises in Islampur, following which they rescued her. Following this, the victim's family revealed that the accused had lured her into a relationship since she was 17, eventually convincing her to run away with him to Islampur. Upon turning 19, she faced intense pressure to convert to Islam through systematic brainwashing and manipulation. Furthermore, the accused planned to sell her into prostitution within the Panjipari red-light area. For converting her to Islam, the accused had taken her to court to file papers for her conversion process. Former Bharatiya Janata Party Member of the Legislative Assembly and social activist Shrirupa Mitra Chowdhury disclosed the incident at a press conference held at the Bharatiya Janata Party office of the Islampur Municipal Board on 15 July 2026. As per Chowdhury, the accused was being helped by his family members in the grooming and brainwashing of the Hindu girl for conversion. She also revealed that a video of the accused was found by Bharatiya Janata Party workers and Hindu activists in which he was admitting to having planned to sell the girl for a sum of money. She also revealed that the victim's family, along with Hindu activists, filed a complaint at the local police station. Following the complaint, the police began questioning Mohammad Shahil and launched an investigation into the case, including the trafficking conspiracy.
Why it is Hate Crime ?
This case has been added to the primary category: Predatory Proselytisation. The sub-category selected is: Proselytisation by grooming, brainwashing, manipulation, or subtle indoctrination. The tertiary categories selected are: Conversion of Minor and Family claims grooming. 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. The other sub-category selected 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. The second primary category selected is: Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes. The sub-category selected is: Brainwashed and/or Groomed. The tertiary categories selected are: Conversion of Minor and Family claims grooming. 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. The other sub-category selected is: Forced conversion before marriage. In such cases, a non-Hindu man is in a relationship with a Hindu woman when the pressure to convert her religion begins to manifest. In such cases, typically, two patterns emerge. First, when the relationship is consensual, and the religious identity of the perpetrator is known to the Hindu woman in the relationship, however, at some point during the relationship, the non-Hindu man starts to force the victim to convert her religion and give up her Hindu religious identity. The second is when the woman gets into a marriage with the man pretending to share her faith. Later, when the truth is revealed, the man starts pressuring the woman to convert her religion and give up her religious identity. In both the situations, the methods used to force the victim to convert her religion often revolve around force-feeding beef, forcing her to wear hijab, forcing her to read the Kalma or even pressurizing the victim to do ‘Nikah’, which is marriage under Islamic law, with a prerequisite being conversion to Islam. Cases where a Hindu woman consensually converts to Islam in a relationship will be left out of the hate crime database, even though it could be argued in several cases that the conversion was a result of religious brainwashing. This case is a clear and explicit example of a religiously motivated hate crime, as a minor Hindu girl was targeted, lured, and groomed at a vulnerable age before being made to elope from her home and convert to Islam by the Muslim perpetrator. The subsequent actions of the perpetrator, who actively attempted to sell her into prostitution at a red-light area, confirm the underlying biases of the act. These factors collectively demonstrate that the targeting, manipulation, and intended exploitation of the victim were driven by religious animosity, qualifying the entire sequence of events as a distinct anti-Hindu hate crime. The fact that the victim was a minor when the grooming began significantly elevates the severity of the crime. Since she is a minor, 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 do not have the ability to fully understand the implications of being in a relationship with an adult or 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, brainwashing, and manipulation to achieve coercive religious conversion, it is a blatant act of religious hate, which is why it has been documented here in the hate tracker. The act of establishing a romantic relationship with the prior intention of forcing a future religious conversion highlights the predatory design of the interaction from its inception. The accused manipulated the victim's tender age to ensnare her in an affair, using the relationship as a functional tool for subsequent grooming and brainwashing. Even though the perpetrator did not conceal his religious identity, the romantic engagement was never genuine; it served purely as a mechanism to facilitate forced conversion. Utilising an emotional bond to isolate and groom a minor with the long-term goal of Islamic conversion reveals that the entire association was hostile and calculated from the outset, driven by deep-seated religious animosity rather than personal affection. Isolating the minor from the safety of her family and the immediate support of her Hindu community by taking her to Islampur constitutes a severe form of harassment and coercion. This displacement was executed specifically to weaken her psychological defences, culminating in intense pressure to sign legal conversion documents at a local court. Removing a young girl from her protective social environment to enforce compliance under duress exemplifies the coercive tactics employed throughout this case. The systematic nature of this harassment, directed entirely toward stripping the victim of her original Hindu identity, underscores the religious hostility that directed the perpetrator's actions from the very beginning. Subjecting the victim to sustained brainwashing and psychological manipulation to compel her to abandon her Hindu faith and convert to Islam reflected a deliberate attack on her religious identity rather than a voluntary change in belief. Such methods sought to wear down her resistance through continuous emotional and psychological pressure until she accepted the Islamic faith, thereby depriving her of the freedom to practise and preserve her own religion. The persistent efforts to erase her Hindu identity and replace it with another faith demonstrate that her religion was not merely incidental to the offence but was the very reason she was targeted. This was not simply an attempt to influence personal beliefs; it was a calculated effort to sever the victim from her religious roots, traditions and identity through coercive means. The use of manipulation and brainwashing to achieve religious conversion transformed the conversion itself into a tool for suppressing and erasing the victim's Hindu identity. By specifically targeting her because she was Hindu and subjecting her to prolonged psychological coercion until she renounced her faith, the perpetrator exhibited hostility towards Hinduism and its followers. The systematic dismantling of the victim's religious identity through coercive conversion, therefore, reflected deep-seated religious animosity, making the attack one that was fundamentally directed against her faith as much as against her as an individual. The perpetrator’s subsequent plan to sell the victim into a prostitution racket at the Panjipari red-light area exposes a deeply dehumanising level of hatred, reducing the victim to an object of absolute exploitation. After systematically exploiting her religious identity through psychological coercion and forced conversion, the accused sought to further exploit her physically and financially by treating her body purely as a commercial commodity to be traded for profit. This rapid progression from religious coercion to human trafficking demonstrates that the victim was never viewed with any human regard, but rather reduced to a resource to be utilised, financially exhausted, and ultimately discarded. The willingness to consign the victim to forced prostitution underscores an absolute disregard for her underlying humanity, safety, and dignity, illustrating the extreme, multilayered suffering inflicted upon her strictly due to her religious background. The actions of the perpetrator reflected a hostile mindset in which the Hindu victim was stripped of her individuality, dignity and autonomy, and treated merely as a means to achieve a series of calculated objectives. She was first targeted for religious conversion through sustained grooming, manipulation and psychological coercion, reducing her faith and identity to obstacles that had to be dismantled. Once her Hindu identity had been systematically undermined, she was then viewed as a commodity to be exploited for financial gain through prostitution. This sequence of conduct demonstrates that the victim was not regarded as a human being with inherent rights and agency, but as an object to be manipulated, converted and ultimately trafficked for profit. The deliberate effort to erase her Hindu identity before subjecting her to further exploitation reflects an exceptionally severe degree of contempt towards her religion and personhood. By specifically targeting the victim because she was Hindu and treating her faith as something to be extinguished before exploiting her commercially, the perpetrator exhibited profound hostility towards Hinduism and its adherents. The combination of religious coercion, psychological domination and planned sexual exploitation transformed the victim into an instrument for ideological and financial objectives, making the incident a stark manifestation of religiously motivated hatred directed against her Hindu identity. Given that this case satisfies the established criteria for targeted religious hostility, 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 was reported in the media. In this case, the victim's ordeal began when she was 17 years old. However, the only specific date available is 15 July 2026, when Bharatiya Janata Party leaders disclosed the case during a press conference, by which time the victim was 19 years old. Based on this timeline, 15 July 2024 has been selected as the indicative incident date, as it corresponds to the approximate period when the victim's ordeal began. This date has been recorded for documentation purposes only. Although the perpetrator's family members were also stated to have been involved in this case, the exact number of family members has not been specified. Therefore, for documentation purposes, the perpetrator count has been recorded as one, referring only to Mohammad Shahil.
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
Complaint filed
Perpetrators Details
Perpetrators
Muslim Extremists
Perpetrators Range
One Person
Perpetrators Gender
male
Sources 
