Hindu woman targeted under false promise of marriage by Muslim man faking Hindu identity and blackmailed to convert in Lucknow

Case ID : 30aa4a9 | Location : Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India | Date of Incident : Mon, 9 September, 2024

Case ID : 30aa4a9

Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India

9 September, 2024

Hindu woman targeted under false promise of marriage by Muslim man faking Hindu identity and blackmailed to convert in Lucknow

Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes

Man pretends to be Hindu

Name Changed

Blackmailed to convert

Case Summary

A young Hindu woman in Lucknow was sexually exploited under the false promise of marriage by a Muslim man who concealed his identity using a fake Hindu name. Upon discovering the truth, the woman faced blackmail, death threats, and pressure to convert to Islam when she attempted to end the relationship. The woman, originally from Nawabganj in Barabanki and residing in Budheshwar under the Para police station jurisdiction in Lucknow, met Ali Qureshi on the social media platform Instagram a few years ago. Qureshi introduced himself using the Hindu name "Raju" and deliberately concealed his Muslim identity. Operating under this false identity and offering a promise of marriage, he initiated a physical relationship with the woman which continued for approximately two years. The woman eventually discovered Qureshi's real name and religious background. When she attempted to distance herself from him, Qureshi initiated a campaign of blackmail and intimidation. He threatened to release her private photographs and videos publicly and issued death threats against her. Escalating the harassment, he sent some of the private visual material directly to the woman's father and continuously pressured her to undergo religious conversion. Following the harassment, the woman submitted a formal complaint to Para police station. Police registered a case based on her statement and took Qureshi, who ran a meat shop in Krishna Nagar area, into custody for questioning, before initiating a formal investigation into the incident.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

This case has been added to the tracker under the primary category- Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes. Within this, the subcategory selected is- Man pretends to be Hindu. With the tertiary category being, Name changed. 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. The other sub-category selected here is - Blackmailed to convert. When Hindu women are in a relationship with non-Hindu men, there are cases where the woman is blackmailed to convert her religion, owing to her religious identity of being a Hindu. Such relationships may be consensual with the religious identity of the non-Hindu man known to the victim, however, there could be cases where the relationship is not consensual and the non-Hindu man starts blackmailing a Hindu woman to convert her religion. In these cases, it is often seen that the Hindu woman is blackmailed with intimate photos and/or videos, threats of harm to her or her family, threats of violence etc. Such cases are driven by specific religious motivations and against the religious identity of the victim and are therefore qualified as hate crimes. 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. This incident qualified as a religiously motivated hate crime because the perpetrator explicitly weaponised a fabricated Hindu identity to deceive the victim. By adopting a fake name from her community, he deliberately bypassed the cultural boundaries the woman would have otherwise maintained. This calculated concealment of his Muslim background demonstrated a malafide intention to target her specifically because of her faith, establishing the connection on a foundation of religious fraud. The victim consented to the relationship and the promise of marriage under the strict belief that her partner shared her beliefs. Because this consent was obtained through active religious deception, the intimacy achieved represented a predatory violation of her religious agency. The perpetrator exploited her trust to lock her into a dynamic she would have rejected had she known the truth from the beginning. Upon the exposure of his actual background, the perpetrator transitioned directly into religious coercion. He weaponised the private visual material gathered during their time together, using it to blackmail the victim when she attempted to distance herself. This extortion operated not as a standard interpersonal dispute, but as a calculated mechanism to force the woman into abandoning her native faith against her will. The severe intimidatory tactics, which included death threats and sending private photographs to her father, served as enforcement tools for this forced conversion. The perpetrator used these threats of harm to break her psychological resistance and trap her in the relationship. The use of explicit blackmail to achieve religious conversion after the failure of the initial deception highlighted a systematic hostility towards her identity. Ultimately, this conduct reflected a clear pattern where deception was followed by aggressive coercion. Because the perpetrator initiated the contact by pretending to be a member of the victim's community and later relied on severe blackmail with intimate material to force a religious conversion against her wishes, the incident firmly met the criteria for a religiously motivated hate crime. Disclaimer: The exact date when the woman and the accused first came into contact on Instagram is unknown. Since their relationship continued for around two years, the actual start date of the ordeal cannot be ascertained. The tracker records incident dates based on when the crime occurred rather than when it was reported or published. In this case the, incident date has been used as 10 September 2024, derived by aligning the known year with reporting date and month.