Minor Hindu girl lured away, forcibly converted to Islam and made to undergo nikah by Muslim man

Case ID : 30aaef0 | Location : Sant Kabir Nagar, Uttar Pradesh, India | Date of Incident : Sat, 22 August, 2026

Case ID : 30aaef0

Sant Kabir Nagar, Uttar Pradesh, India

22 August, 2026

Minor Hindu girl lured away, forcibly converted to Islam and made to undergo nikah by Muslim man

Predatory Proselytisation

Harassment, threats, coercion for conversion

Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes

Forced conversion before marriage

Forced to do Nikah

Case Summary

In the Samda village, Sant Kabir Nagar district, Uttar Pradesh, a 16-year-old Hindu girl was lured away, converted to Islam and made to undergo nikah by a Muslim man named Mohammad Salim. According to reports, the minor victim went missing from her home at around 11 am on 23 August 2026. The victim's brother, Shivkumar, subsequently lodged a complaint at Mehdawal police station, stating that the family had searched for her but had been unable to locate her. He stated that Mohammad Salim had lured the minor victim away and taken her to an unknown location. Mohammad Salim, son of Shabbir and a resident of Sai Buzurg village, had previously worked at Mushtaq’s poultry farm in Samda village and frequently visited the area. He had been working for approximately two months at the premises of Irshad, a resident of Amardobha village in the Bakhira area, before Suman went missing. Police subsequently rescued the victim from a village within the Mehdawal police station area and arrested Mohammad Salim in connection with the case. During the investigation, police found that she was converted to Islam, her name had been changed to Salma Khatoon, and she was forced to undergo nikah by the accused. Following these findings, police added provisions of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Act to the existing case and initiated further legal proceedings.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

The primary category selected in this case is: Predatory Proselytisation. The 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 other primary category selected here is- Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes. Within it, the sub-category selected here is - Forced conversion before marriage, with the tertiary category being - 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. The incident constituted a religiously motivated hate crime because it involved the conversion of a minor Hindu girl to Islam, the replacement of her original name with an Islamic name, and her forced nikah by the Muslim accused. The sequence of events was significant because it demonstrated that the matter extended beyond the disappearance of a minor and involved changes to the victim’s religious identity and marital status. Firstly, the victim’s age was an important factor in assessing the gravity of the incident. At 16, she was a minor and particularly vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. Since the victim was 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 particularly vulnerable to manipulation and coercion. They may not have the ability to fully understand the implications of converting to another religion, and the Muslim perpetrator purposely targeted and exploited this vulnerability of the victim. Furthermore, any supposed consent given for a relationship or elopement is considered invalid under the POCSO Act. Since this case exemplifies the use of coercion and manipulation to achieve religious conversion, it is a blatant act of religious hate. Such acts are not merely criminal in nature; they are ideologically charged, revealing religious prejudice and a calculated intent to alter the religious identity of a minor without her volition. The use of grooming, where trust is built only to exploit, is an insidious method that exploits the child’s naivety and dependence. In this context, the testimony of the family, especially that of a close relative like the brother, holds considerable weight. Such actions stem from inherent hostility towards the victim's professed faith since Abrahamic faiths believe that any non-adherent to the faith is subject to being dehumanised till they convert. Therefore, religious conversions, even of minors, are often seen as a badge of honour, totally disregarding the methods used to achieve it. Since such predatory actions stem from doctrinal animosity towards the Hindu faith and its adherents, this case is being documented as a religiously motivated hate crime. Secondly, the accused's efforts to force the victim to convert to Islam after luring her away demonstrate hostility towards her Hindu religious identity. By pressuring a Hindu minor to abandon her faith and embrace Islam, he treated her religious identity as something that had to be stripped away and replaced with another faith. Religious conversion must stem from an individual’s own conviction and free choice, not from manipulation, sexual exploitation, intimidation or threats. In this case, the perpetrator’s attempts to impose Islam upon the victim, alongside the forced observance of Islamic practices, indicate a deliberate disregard for her Hindu identity and an effort to compel her to conform to a different religion. This coercive attempt to replace her existing faith with Islam makes the religiously hostile nature of the crime evident. Thirdly, the fact that the victim was also forced to undergo nikah further illustrates how marriage was linked to the attempted religious conversion. Under traditional Islamic jurisprudence, a Muslim man’s marriage to a non-Muslim woman is subject to restrictions, and a woman who does not fall within the recognised categories of permissible non-Muslim spouses would be required to embrace Islam for the marriage to be recognised as valid under that framework. The circumstances in this case, in which the accused forced the victim to convert before forcing her to under nikah, demonstrated that marriage and conversion were intertwined in his plans. This showcased religious intolerance by demonstrating the accused's imposition of an Islamic religious identity on a Hindu minor as part of the process of nikah, disregarding her existing religious identity and right to retain her faith. The change of the victim’s name to Salma Khatoon was also relevant to the assessment of religious motivation. A name can serve as an important marker of personal and religious identity, and its replacement alongside conversion to Islam indicated a broader transformation of the victim’s established identity. It was an symbolic erasure of her previous Hindu identity and an assertion of an Islamic identity. The incident was therefore significant from a hate crime perspective because the conduct culminated in the alteration of a minor Hindu girl’s religious identity through conversion, accompanied by a name change and marriage. Such actions stem from inherent hostility towards the victim's professed faith since Abrahamic faiths believe that any non-adherent to the faith is subject to being dehumanised till they convert. Therefore, religious conversions, even of minors, are often seen as a badge of honour, totally disregarding the methods used to achieve it. Since such predatory actions stem from doctrinal animosity towards the Hindu faith and its adherents, this case is being documented as a religiously motivated hate crime.