Hindu woman driven to suicide following mental harassment and religious entrapment by Muslim man in Mahoba, Uttar Pradesh
Mahoba, Uttar Pradesh, India 
6 April, 2022
Case Summary
In the Vasudev neighbourhood of Charkhari town in Mahoba district, Uttar Pradesh, a 21-year-old Hindu woman, Khushboo, died by suicide by hanging herself at her home. In her suicide note, she mentioned that she was ending her life due to severe mental harassment and entrapment into what she termed "love jihad" by a Muslim man named Salman. On 7 April 2022, Khushboo's father, Ramswaroop Prajapati, found her hanging from a noose but still breathing. He immediately rushed her to the local hospital for medical treatment, where doctors declared her dead. Law enforcement authorities recovered a suicide note from Khushboo's possession. In the written statement, she explicitly named Salman, a resident of Bhairoganj, as the individual responsible for her death. She stated that he had trapped her in "love jihad" and subjected her to severe mental harassment, leaving her with no option but to end her life. She demanded strict punishment for him in her final note. Based on a formal complaint Khushboo’s father submitted on 9 April 2022, the local police registered a First Information Report against Salman and later submitted the case documents and charge sheet to the court. Following the trial, Additional Sessions Judge Dhruv Rai found Salman guilty of abetment to suicide. The court sentenced him to five years of imprisonment and imposed a fine of ₹25,000.
Why it is Hate Crime ?
This case has been added to the tracker under the primary category of - Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes. Within it, the sub-category selected is - Suicide for being forced to or pressured to convert. When Hindu women are in a relationship with a non-Hindu men, there are cases where the woman faces pressure/threats/violence to convert and change her religious identity by the non-Hindu man. Such relationships may be consensual with the religious identity of the non-Hindu man known to the victim. Somewhere along the relationship, the non-Hindu man starts pressurizing the Hindu woman to convert. In some of these cases, unable to bear the pressure/threat/violence being mounted by the non-Hindu partner to convert, the Hindu woman commits suicide. In such cases, often, threats are also given to the family members of the Hindu woman. Since such cases are driven by specific religious motivations and against the religious identity of the victim, leading to the woman committing suicide, these cases are categorized as a hate crime. The victim’s dying declaration in her suicide note categorically established the religious motive behind her exploitation. By writing, "Salman ne mujhe love jihad mein phansaya" (Salman trapped me in love jihad), she identified the exact nature of the abuse. In this operational context, 'love jihad' defined the systematic targeting of Hindu girls by non-Hindu men, where relationships were initiated with the ultimate goal of enforcing religious conversion. The victim's own words confirmed she was targeted and trapped specifically because of her Hindu faith. The relentless mental harassment inflicted upon the victim functioned as an instrument oof psychological domination. The perpetrator utilised persistent coercion to strip the victim of her personal autonomy, seeking to erase her religious identity. When the pressure to submit to this religious entrapment and the accompanying mental torture became unendurable, the victim was left entirely cornered. The coercion was so severe that it drove her to take her own life, making the suicide a direct consequence of religious intimidation. The judicial decision to convict the perpetrator for abetment to suicide, based squarely on the victim's written testimony of religious entrapment, legally validated the coercive nature of the crime. The abuse stemmed directly from a doctrinal hostility that viewed the victim's Hindu identity as something to be conquered and erased. Because the sustained harassment and the resulting tragedy were rooted entirely in religious animosity, this incident was classified as a verified hate crime. This case formed part of a severe, documented pattern of religious persecution. The Hinduphobia Tracker recorded 1,467 incidents of love jihad, illustrating the widespread systematic targeting of Hindu women. Within this dataset, the tracker documented 31 cases where extreme relationship-based religious coercion pushed victims to suicide, with 23 of those cases resulting in confirmed deaths. These figures established a clear methodology where Muslim perpetrators utilised psychological torture to force conversion, frequently resulting in fatal outcomes for the Hindu victims. Disclaimer: The exact date of when the Hindu woman and the Muslim perpetrator first came into contact, or when the coercion and harassment began, was not specified in the available sources. The tracker records incident dates based on when the crime occurred or culminated, rather than when it was reported or published. In this case, 7 April 2022 has been used as the indicative incident date and has been recorded for documentation purposes only.
Victim Details
Total Victim
1
Deceased
1
Gender
- Male 0
- Female 1
- Third Gender 0
- Unknown 0
Caste
- SC/ST 0
- OBC 0
- General 0
- Unknown 1
Age Group
- Minor 0
- Adult 1
- Senior Citizen 0
- Unknown 0
Case Status
Perpetrator held guilty by court
Perpetrators Details
Perpetrators
Muslim Extremists
Perpetrators Range
One Person
Perpetrators Gender
male
Sources 
