Hindu family targeted for conversion in Barabanki; wife and son converted, husband threatened with death and pressured to change faith to reunite with them

Case ID : 30aa6b2 | Location : Tikaitnagar, Uttar Pradesh, India | Date of Incident : Wed, 17 September, 2025

Case ID : 30aa6b2

Tikaitnagar, Uttar Pradesh, India

17 September, 2025

Hindu family targeted for conversion in Barabanki; wife and son converted, husband threatened with death and pressured to change faith to reunite with them

Predatory Proselytisation

Harassment, threats, coercion for conversion

Case Summary

In Tikaitnagar, Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh, a Hindu man from Pansara village stated that his wife, Seeba alias Radhika, and their son, Shivansh, were targeted for religious conversion by two men identified as Mukhtar and Abdul Wahid alias Kallu. The two men kept his wife and son away from him and prevented him from meeting them. They also threatened to kill him, pressured him to change his own religion if he wanted to reunite with his family, and took approximately ₹66,000 from him on the pretext of arranging a meeting. The complainant had married Seeba alias Radhika, a resident of Pansara village, around six years earlier. The couple had a son named Shivansh. In September 2025, the man left home for work as usual. When he returned that evening, he found his wife and son missing. He searched extensively for them but could not locate them. The man later learnt that his wife and son had been taken to Belkhara village and were being kept with Mukhtar, son of Siraj, and Abdul Wahid alias Kallu, son of Inayat Hussain. According to his complaint, the two men had converted his wife and son to Islam and were refusing to allow him to meet them. The complainant repeatedly tried to regain access to his family, but the accused continued preventing any meeting. They also threatened to kill him and used the separation from his wife and son as a means of exerting pressure over him. The accused further told the man that if he wanted to reunite with his wife and son, he would also have to change his religion. The religious pressure therefore extended beyond his wife and child and was used directly against him by making reunion with his family conditional upon conversion. Under the pretext of arranging a meeting with his wife and son, the accused took approximately ₹66,000 from the complainant. Despite taking the money, they did not facilitate the promised meeting, leaving him separated from his family while the threats and conversion pressure continued. The man initially approached Tikaitnagar Kotwali Police and sought action, but no effective action followed. He subsequently submitted formal complaints to the Superintendent of Police and the District Magistrate, seeking intervention and action against the accused. Barabanki Superintendent of Police Arpit Vijay Vargiya subsequently took cognisance of the matter and directed an investigation. The inquiry covered the disappearance and conversion of the woman and child, the threats issued to the complainant, the pressure placed upon him to convert, and the payment of approximately ₹66,000 for arranging access to his family.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

The primary category selected for this case is: Predatory proselytisation. The subcategory selected for this case is: Harassment, threat, coercion for conversion. Harassment covers a wide range of offensive behaviours. 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 in discriminatory grounds, which have the effect of nullifying a person’s rights or infringing upon his freedom to exercise his rights 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 documented cases, 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. This incident has been categorised as a religiously motivated hate crime because the Hindu family was subjected to sustained religious coercion in which conversion was directly tied to family separation, threats and control. The wife and son had already been converted, while the husband was subsequently pressured to abandon his own faith if he wished to meet or reunite with them. The conduct therefore placed the family’s Hindu identity at the centre of the offence and transformed religious conversion into a condition for restoring basic familial contact. Firstly, the conversion of the Hindu woman and her son, followed by pressure on the husband to convert as well, constituted a direct interference with the religious autonomy of the entire family. The most significant element was not merely that different religions were involved, but that the husband’s continued adherence to Hinduism was treated as an obstacle that had to be removed before he could regain access to his wife and child. He was effectively forced to choose between retaining his faith and maintaining his family relationship. Such pressure goes far beyond ordinary religious persuasion. It uses the emotional dependence inherent in family bonds as leverage to compel religious change and reflects hostility towards the victim’s right to remain Hindu. Secondly, the refusal to allow the husband to meet his wife and son, combined with threats to kill him, converted the religious demand into explicit coercion and intimidation. A religious conversion can be treated as voluntary only when the individual is free to accept or reject it without fear, punishment, or deprivation. Here, the husband’s refusal to change his religion was met with continued separation from his family and threats to his life. The perpetrators therefore sought to weaken his resistance not through theological persuasion but through fear, emotional pressure and the deprivation of access to his loved ones. This demonstrated animosity towards his continued Hindu identity because his religious adherence itself became the reason he was subjected to pressure and intimidation. Overall, the incident demonstrated a sustained effort to alter the religious identity of a Hindu family through separation, pressure, intimidation and exploitation. The wife and son had already been converted, while the husband was told that he too would have to abandon Hinduism if he wanted to be reunited with them. His family bonds were used as leverage, his continued Hindu identity became the obstacle to reunion, and threats of death were used to reinforce the conversion demand. The ₹66,000 extracted from him compounded his vulnerability. The strongest religious nexus therefore lay in coercion for conversion and the deliberate use of family separation and threats to force a Hindu man to relinquish his faith. Such acts are carried out by Muslim perpetrators due to indoctrination by Islamic theology, which advocates that all non-Muslims (referred to as kafirs) are inferior and subject to subjugation unless they convert to Islam or live under Islamic rule (dhimmitude). These ideas are not mere abstractions; they manifest in actions where non-Muslims, especially Hindus in India, are seen as targets for religious domination, coercion, or humiliation. This theological framework fosters an "us versus them" mindset, in which any assertion of Hindu identity or religious freedom is seen not only as undesirable but as a threat to Islamic supremacy. As a result, perpetrators who are shaped by such teachings feel justified, even morally obligated, to harass, suppress, or violently attack Hindus, particularly when Hindus assert their religious rights or resist conversion. As a result, Muslim perpetrators invoke such doctrines to justify coercive attempts to convert non-Muslims, particularly Hindus, portraying conversion as a means of abandoning Kufr (a state of disbelief in Islam or disbelief in Islam) and attaining salvation. Such acts, therefore, are not isolated but driven by a broader ideological hostility towards Hindus as non-believers and reflect an attempt to impose religious dominance. Since this case was also not a random isolated incident of grooming of a minor but a premeditated attack motivated by bias and hatred against the Hindu community, which is a defining feature of hate crimes, this has been added to the tracker. Disclaimer: The exact date on which the Hindu woman and her son were taken away, and the family’s ordeal began, was not specified in the available sources. The material only stated that the incident occurred in September 2025. The Hinduphobia Tracker records incident dates based on when the crime or victimisation began, not when the matter was subsequently reported or published. Therefore, we recorded 18th September 2025 as the indicative incident date derived by aligning the report date (18th) with the known month and year (September 2025). This has been used for documentation purposes only.