Hindu woman forcefully converted to Islam, given Muslim name and married through nikah in Haridwar

Case ID : 30aa5a6 | Location : Haridwar, Uttarakhand, India | Date of Incident : Sat, 13 December, 2025

Case ID : 30aa5a6

Haridwar, Uttarakhand, India

13 December, 2025

Hindu woman forcefully converted to Islam, given Muslim name and married through nikah in Haridwar

Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes

Forced conversion before marriage

Forced to do Nikah

Case Summary

In Nehendpur Suthari village, Sultanpur police outpost area of Laksar, Haridwar district, Uttarakhand, a Hindu woman was converted to Islam, renamed “Shabnoor”, and married through nikah as a Muslim man's second wife. The conversion took place after the woman was taken to Kaliyar, and a maulvi conducted the nikah. In 2025, the Muslim man, a resident of a village in the Laksar Kotwali area, went to Chhattisgarh to work at a sugarcane crusher. While working there, he met a Hindu woman and developed a relationship with her. In December 2025, he brought the woman to his home in Uttarakhand, where the two began living together. After he brought her home, the man's first wife objected to her presence. She said that her husband was keeping the woman in their home without her consent and had married her without divorcing his first wife. She also accused him of beating her when she opposed the relationship. She further said that some members of her husband's family supported him. On 10 September 2026, the first wife sent a complaint by registered post to the Sultanpur Police Chowki, informing the police about the matter and requesting action. She said that no action followed her complaint. On 14 September 2026, she approached Devendra Singh Negi, Circle Officer, Laksar, and submitted a written complaint seeking an impartial investigation and legal action. She raised the issue of her husband keeping the other woman at home, the woman's change of name to Shabnoor, the religious conversion matter and the involvement of members of her husband's family. Police confirmed they had received the complaint and said they were investigating. He said they would take further action based on the facts and evidence found during the investigation. Police subsequently arrested and questioned the accused as they gathered information about the case.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

The primary category selected in this case is: Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes. The subcategory selected 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 has been added to the tracker because it involves a Hindu woman who was targeted because of her religious identity. She was converted to Islam, renamed “Shabnoor”, and made to undergo a nikah as a Muslim man’s second wife. If a person is deliberately targeted because she belongs to the Hindu faith and is then subjected to actions intended to separate her from her Hindu religious and cultural identity, it represents not only an individual dispute but also an attack on the rights of a Hindu community to preserve its faith and identity. At the core of the religious dimension was the conversion from Hinduism to Islam. The woman had been identified as Hindu before the conversion and was subsequently brought into Islam. This represented a direct departure from the Hindu faith in which she had previously lived. The significance extended beyond a change of personal belief: her established Hindu religious affiliation, practices and connection to her inherited faith were displaced by another religious identity. The conversion therefore constituted the clearest religious marker in the circumstances surrounding her treatment. Closely connected with this was the change of her name to “Shabnoor”. Her Hindu identity was accompanied by her original name, which was subsequently replaced with a Muslim name following the conversion. A name carries religious, familial and cultural associations, and its replacement in the context of conversion reinforced the transition from her Hindu identity to an Islamic one. The change therefore served as a visible marker of the abandonment of her previous Hindu religious and cultural identity and its replacement with an Islamic identity. The subsequent nikah ceremony gave the religious change a formal marital dimension. After the conversion, she was married through nikah, an Islamic form of marriage, with the ceremony conducted by a maulvi. Her marriage was consequently placed within an Islamic religious framework rather than the Hindu framework associated with her original faith. The sequence was significant because the conversion was followed by a religiously Islamic marriage ceremony, further embedding the woman within a faith different from the one with which she had originally identified. Equally significant was her being made the second wife of a Muslim man. The religious context of this arrangement differed from the marital framework applicable to Hindus. Hindu personal law generally required monogamy and prohibited a Hindu man from marrying again while his existing Hindu marriage continued, whereas Muslim personal law traditionally permitted a Muslim man to have multiple wives, subject to the applicable legal requirements. The woman, however, belonged to the Hindu faith and was placed in a second-wife arrangement after her conversion. This represented another departure from the marital norms associated with her original religious identity and placed her within a marital structure associated with the husband's Muslim religious framework. Viewed together, these elements formed a progression from religious conversion to the adoption of a Muslim name, followed by an Islamic marriage ceremony and a second-wife marital status. Each element affected a different aspect of the woman's former Hindu identity—her faith, her name and cultural identity, her religious marriage institution and her marital status. Collectively, they represented a substantial departure from the Hindu religious and cultural framework with which she had originally been associated. Accordingly, this case has been documented in the Hinduphobia Tracker's Hate Crime Database as an instance of religiously motivated hostility directed against Hinduism and the religious identity of the Hindu community. Disclaimer: The exact date on which the Hindu woman and the Muslim man first came into contact was not specified in the available sources. However, the available reports indicated that they first met in December 2025, when the man had gone to Chhattisgarh to work at a sugarcane crusher. The tracker records incident dates based on when the crime occurred rather than when it was reported or published. In this case, 14th December 2025 has been used as the indicative incident date, derived by aligning the known year and month of their first contact with the article publication date. This date has been recorded for documentation purposes only.