Minor Hindu girl abducted, sexually assaulted, forcibly converted to Islam and made to undergo nikah by Muslim man in Navi Mumbai
Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, India 
28 September, 2026
Case Summary
In the Rabale Police Station area of Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, a minor Hindu girl was lured into a relationship by a 38-year-old Muslim man. She was abducted from her home, sexually assaulted, forcibly converted to Islam, and made to undergo a nikah (Islamic marriage). This incident came to public attention when Kirit Somaiya, former Bharatiya Janata Party Member of the Legislative Assembly, posted about it on his X handle on 28 September 2026. According to his post, the victim was a 15-year-old Hindu girl who was trapped in a relationship, kidnapped, converted to Islam, and subjected to an illegal forced nikah by the 38-year-old Muslim accused. His post further stated that the victim's mother had registered a First Information Report at Rabale MIDC Police Station. Kirit Somaiya also wrote: “I talked to the mother and the police, demanded strict action against the kidnapper, and also action against the Kazi (Islamic cleric) who performed the nikah.” Following the viral post, the Hinduphobia Tracker contacted Senior Inspector Shri Devidas Kathale of Rabale MIDC Police Station. He confirmed that the victim was a minor Hindu girl who had been abducted from her home by the Muslim man after he trapped her in a relationship. He further stated that the victim was sexually assaulted, forcibly converted to Islam, and married to the accused through a nikah. At the time of writing, the police informed the Hinduphobia Tracker team that the accused had been booked under sections relating to kidnapping, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, and the anti-forced conversion law. He had been arrested and was to be produced before the court.
Why it is Hate Crime ?
This case is being added to the tracker under the first primary category: Predatory Proselytisation. The subcategory selected is: Proselytisation by grooming, brainwashing, manipulation or subtle indoctrination. The tertiary categories are: Rape and sexual assault/harassment, Conversion of minor, 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 subcategory 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 or other sexual crimes. The subcategory selected is: Brainwashed and/or Groomed. The tertiary categories are: Rape and sexual assault/harassment, Conversion of minor, 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 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, 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 was classified by Hinduphobia Tracker as a religiously motivated hate crime because a minor Hindu girl was lured into a relationship, abducted from her home, sexually assaulted, forcibly converted to Islam, and made to undergo a nikah by a Muslim man. The sequence of events indicates that her religious identity was central to the targeting. She was not merely subjected to violent crimes; she was targeted as a Hindu girl, making the religious hostility behind the offence explicitly clear. The fact that the victim was a minor makes the gravity of the case even more severe, because as 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 especially vulnerable to manipulation, grooming, and coercion. They are often unable to comprehend the lifelong religious, psychological, and legal consequences of conversion or of being drawn into a relationship with a significantly older adult. In this case, the perpetrator exploited that vulnerability, groomed the victim, abducted her, and subjected her to conversion, making the religious targeting apparent from the very beginning. The victim's abduction from her home for the purpose of conversion further demonstrated the coercive nature of the crime. She was removed from the safety and protection of her family, isolating her from the people most capable of safeguarding her welfare and exercising legal guardianship over her. Such isolation substantially increased her vulnerability to manipulation, intimidation, and religious coercion. The abduction was therefore not merely an act of kidnapping; it created the conditions under which the victim was separated from her family and made more susceptible to forced religious conversion, reinforcing the religiously motivated nature of the offence. The sexual assault inflicted upon the victim formed another crucial element of the religious targeting. In incidents where sexual violence is accompanied by coercive religious conversion, the assault extends beyond physical violence and becomes part of a broader pattern of domination and dehumanisation. The victim's bodily autonomy, dignity, and personal agency were violated before she was subjected to conversion and nikah. The sequence of sexual assault followed by forced religious conversion demonstrates how sexual violence was used as a tool of coercion to break the victim's resistance and make her more vulnerable, making the religious hostility underpinning the crime explicitly evident. The victim's forcible conversion to Islam constituted the clearest religious marker of the case. Conversion is meaningful only when it arises from an individual's free will, informed consent, and genuine change of conscience. Here, those essential elements were absent. The victim was a minor who had been abducted, sexually assaulted, and placed under coercive circumstances before being forcibly converted. Rather than reflecting a voluntary adoption of faith, the conversion represented the deprivation of her religious autonomy and the stripping away of her Hindu identity through force, making the religious motivation behind the offence unmistakable. The subsequent nikah further reinforced that religious dimension. Under Islamic religious law, a Muslim man's marriage to a non-Muslim woman is governed by specific religious requirements that the woman convert to Islam, and in this case the victim's conversion preceded the marriage ceremony. The chronology indicates that the conversion and nikah were intrinsically connected rather than independent events. The nikah served to formalise and institutionalise the victim's coerced conversion, transforming the forced religious change into a recognised marital relationship. For a minor Hindu girl, this made the marriage not an expression of free choice but the culmination of coercion, reinforcing the religiously motivated nature of the crime. Overall, the targeting of a Hindu minor through grooming, abduction, sexual assault, forcible conversion, and nikah demonstrated a sustained pattern of religiously motivated abuse. As the victim's Hindu identity remained central to the sequence of offences, Hinduphobia Tracker classified and documented this incident in its hate crime database. Disclaimer: Hinduphobia Tracker records incident dates based on when the victim's ordeal begins, not when the incident is reported in the media or when it comes to light on social media. However, in this current case, the earliest publicly available information emerged through Kirit Somaiya's post on 28 September 2026. Accordingly, 28 September 2026 has been selected as the indicative incident date for documentation purposes only. In this case, the accused Muslim man and the Qazi (Islamic cleric) who performed the nikah were both identified in the available information. Accordingly, both individuals have been recorded as perpetrators, and the perpetrator count has been documented as two for documentation purposes only.
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
Arrested
Perpetrators Details
Perpetrators
Muslim Extremists
Perpetrators Range
From 2 To 5
Perpetrators Gender
male
Sources 
