Hindu woman lured, abducted and pressured to convert to Islam and marry Muslim man in Pakistan

Case ID : 30aa277 | Location : | Date of Incident : Tue, 1 September, 2026

Case ID : 30aa277

1 September, 2026

Hindu woman lured, abducted and pressured to convert to Islam and marry Muslim man in Pakistan

Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes

Forced conversion before marriage

Forced to do Nikah

Case Summary

In Gujranwala, Punjab, Pakistan, a 21-year-old Hindu woman, Shirimati Reeta, was lured into a relationship, abducted, pressured to convert to Islam, and forced to marry Nazeer Hussain, a Muslim man who was already married. Reeta was a resident of Rana Rajput Colony, Khipro tehsil, Sanghar district, Sindh, and was the daughter of Wishan Das. She went missing from her hometown on 24 August 2026. Her brother Ravi Shankar lodged a complaint at Sanghar police station after she disappeared. According to the complaint, a closed-circuit television camera installed at the family's residence recorded unidentified persons taking Reeta away, together with valuables and mobile phones, during the night of 23–24 August 2026. The complaint described the persons as having forcibly taken her from the family residence. Reeta was taken from Sanghar district in Sindh to Gujranwala in Punjab, which was around 80 kilometres from Lahore. The complaint identified Nazeer Hussain as the man to whom Reeta was forced to marry and stated that he was already married. The Sindh Home Department informed its counterparts in Punjab about the first information report and sought assistance in recovering Reeta. Acting on information received by the authorities, Eminabad police of Gujranwala recovered her. Other reports referred to the recovering force as the Punjab Police. On Monday, 31 August 2026, the Punjab Police produced Reeta before a judicial magistrate. During the proceedings, the investigating officer filed an application requesting that she be placed in Darul Aman, a State-run government shelter, for safe custody. The investigating officer stated that Reeta was unwilling to return to her parents. Reeta's lawyers, Asad Jamal and Kheta Ram, opposed the investigating officer's request. They told the court that Reeta was willing to return to her parents' home with her brother. Kuldeep Kumar, identified as her brother, was present in court during the proceedings. The lawyers also told the court that Reeta wanted to record her own statement. Magistrate Muhammad Suleman directed Reeta to record her statement under oath. In her statement, Reeta said that she wanted to return to her parents' home of her own free will and consent. She also stated that she faced no threat to her life and was under no pressure while recording her statement. Following Reeta's statement, the magistrate rejected the request to send her to Darul Aman and allowed her to leave with her brother Kuldeep Kumar. He was made responsible for her safe custody and transportation back to her family's home in Sanghar. Sanghar police personnel were present in court.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

The primary category selected in this case is: Crime against women in relationships and other sexual crimes. The subcategory selected in this case is: Forced conversion before marriage. The tertiary category selected is: Forced to do Nikah. 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, 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 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 pressuring 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 qualifies as a religiously motivated hate crime because the victim was targeted as a member of a Hindu minority community, was lured and subjected to abduction, pressure to convert to Islam, and forced marriage. The acts involved coercion aimed at erasing or replacing her Hindu religious identity through forced religious conversion and marriage. Firstly, forced religious conversion was an attack on the victim’s Hindu faith because she was pressured to abandon Hinduism and accept Islam without freely choosing to do so. Religious identity is not something that another person has the right to remove through coercion. The pressure to renounce Hinduism therefore amounted to an assault on her ability to remain Hindu, practise her faith, and preserve the religious identity she had inherited. It also treated Hinduism as an identity that could be forcibly displaced by another religion rather than one that deserved to be respected and preserved. The conversion was particularly harmful to Hinduism because it sought to take a Hindu woman out of the Hindu religious community and incorporate her into another faith through coercion rather than personal conviction. Secondly, the erasure and replacement of her Hindu identity represented a further harm to Hinduism because the objective was not merely to disregard her faith but to substitute it with an Islamic identity. Her identity as a Hindu was consequently stripped of its religious significance and replaced through pressure. This undermined her connection with Hindu religious life, family traditions and the wider Hindu community. The forced replacement of Hindu identity was therefore a direct rejection of her right to remain part of Hinduism and represented the displacement of a Hindu identity by an Islamic one. Thirdly, the forced Islamic marriage compounded the religious harm because the marriage was tied to her conversion from Hinduism to Islam. Her entry into a Muslim marital arrangement followed the attempted removal of her Hindu identity, meaning that marriage became another mechanism through which her Hindu religious affiliation was displaced. This was particularly harmful because a Hindu woman was prevented from retaining her religious identity and was instead incorporated into a Muslim household and religious framework without her consent. The combination of conversion and marriage therefore only compounded the persecution of the victim. In this specific case, it is important to also explain the dynamics of religious conversions in Pakistan. It is true that there are several religious conversions around the world that are completely voluntary and undertaken of one's own free will, driven by a change in faith. However, religious conversions in Pakistan have an especially predatory nature. Pakistan, being an Islamic nation, harbours specific animosity towards non-Muslims, especially Hindus. Human Rights reports have detailed how Hindu women and girls are abducted by Muslim men and forcefully converted to Islam, then married off to their abductors. Hindus are widely persecuted based on their religion. There are instances where minors, who were forced to convert after being kidnapped, were handed over to their abductors even by the courts of Pakistan. Temples are desecrated and razed to the ground, religious symbols destroyed, and Hindus killed merely for displaying their faith. Under such circumstances, the version that the woman was an adult and converted to Islam of their own free will is a version that is most likely coloured by religious bigotry and coercion. Further, there is a strong possibility that even if the Hindus say they converted out of their own free will, it is to escape persecution if they don't convert to Islam in Pakistan. Disclaimer: The Hinduphobia Tracker records incidents based on when an event occurred or when the victim's ordeal began. It is important to clarify that none of the media sources covering this case has specified the exact date when the incident occurred. Therefore, for documentation purposes, we have recorded the date as the date the incident was reported in the media, 1st September 2026.