Hindu woman deceived and forced to convert to Islam by Muslim man masquerading as Hindu; abused and forced into nikah
Baghpat, Uttar Pradesh, India 
31 December, 2017
Case Summary
A Hindu woman was deceived, exploited and forcibly converted by a Muslim man who hid his identity and trapped her in a sham marriage. This lead to years of abuse and criminal violations. The incident toook place in Baghpat district, Uttar Pradesh. The victim, Kanta, first met the accused in January 2018 while travelling on a local bus. He introduced himself as Rahul Malik, claiming to belong to a nearby Jat village. Believing him to be Hindu, she exchanged numbers with him, and they grew close. At that time, she was working in Gurgaon and occasionally visiting her home village. Their conversations gradually progressed into a relationship. Two months later, when Kanta’s family arranged her marriage within the community, the man revealed his real identity: Imran, a Muslim. He admitted that he had hidden this from her because he feared she would never continue the relationship if she knew the truth. By then, emotionally attached and under pressure, she felt unable to leave him. Imran repeatedly urged her to elope, saying he would harm himself or her family if she refused. Fearing the threats and believing his assurances, she agreed. On 26 March 2018, exactly one month before her arranged marriage, she eloped with him to Delhi. Imran and a friend arranged accommodation in Ghaziabad, where he pushed her into signing multiple marriage documents. First, he made her sign a nikahnama in a mosque, renaming her Zoya. Later, he presented an Arya Samaj marriage certificate showing his name as Rahul. She signed both documents at home without witnessing any rituals. Imran told her the Arya Samaj papers were “for the government,” and the nikah certificate was “proof before his God” that he had brought her into Islam. She was never taken to the temple whose certificate she signed. Soon after, Kanta realised the marriage was a sham. Imran never used his Hindu alias outside the paperwork and insisted she accept a Muslim identity. He forbade her from keeping murtis, stopped her from performing any Hindu rituals, and forced her to cook and eat meat. He kept her hidden from relatives and neighbours, refusing to acknowledge her as a daughter-in-law. She was isolated, monitored and denied all autonomy. During this period, her father had already filed a kidnapping FIR. In response, Imran gave her an affidavit to sign stating she had married Rahul of her own will. As she was a major, the Allahabad High Court dropped the kidnapping case. By late 2018, the abuse escalated. Imran’s family subjected her to caste slurs, repeatedly calling her “chamaari” and humiliating her for not bringing dowry. His elder brother Shahid forcibly raped her, and when she told Imran, he justified it by saying this was why he had brought a Scheduled Caste woman into his home. Multiple family members assaulted and demeaned her. She said she felt imprisoned, hidden and stripped of dignity. On 22 November 2018, unable to endure further abuse, she fled the house and called her father. When he saw her condition, he said no father should witness his daughter in such a state. On 5 December 2018, she filed an FIR against Imran and his family under charges including rape, assault, caste atrocity, and dowry harassment. The accused obtained a stay on arrest from the Allahabad High Court, and despite notices from the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, no arrests were made. In 2019, she filed for divorce under Section 12 of the Hindu Marriage Act. The court found Imran had deceived her by fraudulently posing as a Hindu, using the name Rahul only in marriage papers to mislead her. The judge observed that Imran was a practising Muslim, that the Hindu marriage certificate was invalid, and that he had never accepted Hinduism or honoured Hindu marriage rituals. The court declared the marriage null and void. Later, under police supervision, both parties agreed not to pursue further legal action.
Why it is Hate Crime ?
The primary category in this case is: Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes. The first subcategory under this is: Man pretends to be Hindu. The tertiary categories under this are: Name Changed and Marries as per Hindu rituals. When a non-Hindu man pretends to be a Hindu to deceive a Hindu woman into a relationship, the act is seen as triggered by malafide intentions. In some cases, the woman eventually accepts the man’s original religious identity and converts after the man’s identity is revealed. These cases could be argued as cases of religious brainwashing and a result of the pressure a woman feels after getting into a relationship with a man. The woman, it can be argued, also changed her religious identity because of the stigma she believes she might face if she chooses to walk out of a deceptive relationship. However, for the purpose of documenting hate crimes, the cases in this subcategory are limited to those where there is explicit violence aimed at religious conversion against the wishes of the victim (force-feeding beef, blackmailing with intimate videos, rape on refusal to convert, etc), or if the woman herself complains of the man’s religious deception. In such cases, it is established that the deception of the non-Hindu man had a specific aim of religious conversion or targeting of the victim due to her Hindu religious identity, therefore, making it a religiously motivated hate crime. Another subcategory under this is: Forced conversion before marriage. The tertiary categories under this are: Forced to do Nikah and Forced to follow non-Hindu religious practices. 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. Another subcategory under this is: Desecration of Hindu symbols in relationship. When Hindu women are in a relationship with non-Hindu men, there are cases where the woman faces insult and desecration of her faith (Hinduism) and its symbol because of the inherent disregard for polytheism of the non-Hindu partner. 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 desecrating the religious symbols of the Hindu partner out of spite for her faith. Such cases are driven by specific religious motivations and against the religious identity of the victim and are therefore qualified as hate crimes. Another subcategory under this is: Brainwashed and/or groomed. The tertiary category under this is: Anti-Hindu slurs, mocking faith. 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. Another primary category in this case is: Hate speech against Hindus. The subcategory under this is: Anti-Hindu slurs and mocking faith. Anti-Hindu slurs and the deliberate mocking of the Hindu faith owing to religious animosity involve the usage of derogatory terms, stereotypes, or offensive references to religious practices, symbols, or figures. One of the common anti-Hindu slurs used against Hindus is “cow-worshipper” and “cow piss drinker”. The intention of using this term is to demean and mock Hindus as a group and their religious beliefs since Hindus consider the cow holy. Additionally, some symbols and the slurs attached to them have a historical context that exacerbates the insult, hate, stereotyping, dehumanisation and oppression against Hindus. Cow worship has been used for centuries to denigrate Hindus, insult their faith and oppress Hindus specifically as a religious group. There has been overwhelming documentation about how cow slaughter has been used to persecute Hindus with cow meat being thrown in temples and places of worship. There has also been overwhelming documentation where cow meat (beef) has been force-fed to Hindus to either forcefully convert them to Islam or denigrate their faith. Apart from cow worship, the Swastika – which holds deep religious significance for the Hindus – has also been misinterpreted and distorted to use as a slur against Hindus. Similarly, the worship of the Shivling has been used by supremacist ideologies and religions to denigrate Hindus owing to religious animosity. Such slurs and denigration stem out of inherent animosity and hate towards Hindus and their faith, therefore, it is categorised as hate speech targeted at Hindus specifically owing to their religious identity. This case has been included in the tracker because the victim’s own testimony establishes that the relationship was engineered through deliberate religious deception, followed by sustained coercion intended to extinguish her Hindu identity. The trajectory of events reflects a pattern in which the accused concealed his religious background to secure emotional proximity, then used psychological pressure, threats and isolation to manoeuvre the victim into a position where resistance became increasingly difficult. The staged marriage documents, the adoption of a false Hindu name and the manipulation of legal processes all point to a carefully constructed sequence designed to remove her agency while preserving the perpetrator’s control. These actions mark the incident as one where the targeting of the victim was intertwined with her Hindu identity and where deception served a religiously oriented purpose. The case is also characterised by explicit attempts to impose a non-Hindu identity upon the victim through measures that were neither symbolic nor incidental but rather central to the way the perpetrator and his family exercised power over her. The insistence that she accept a Muslim name, the pressure to recognise a nikah as her only legitimate marital status and the prohibition of Hindu ritual practice together formed an effort to dismantle her religious selfhood. Accounts of being compelled to eat meat against her convictions, being stopped from keeping murtis and being denied access to any expression of her faith constitute direct coercion aimed at altering or erasing her religious affiliation. Such acts align closely with recognised indicators of forced conversion, especially when combined with deception at the outset. In addition, the violence inflicted upon her was not incidental to domestic cruelty but embedded in a framework of religious and caste based hostility. The derogatory slurs from family members, the sexual assault justified with reference to her caste background and the continual humiliation she faced for retaining a Hindu identity reflect a broader hostility that exceeds personal conflict. The abuse was not merely interpersonal but tied to a worldview in which the perpetrator and his family exerted dominance by attacking both her religious and social identity. This fusion of sexual violence, caste degradation and religious coercion makes the case structurally different from a standard domestic abuse situation. The legal findings further reinforce the religiously motivated nature of the deception. The court’s conclusion that the Hindu marriage certificate was fraudulent, that the accused remained a practising Muslim and that the entire arrangement was designed to mislead the victim supports the interpretation that the initial deception had a distinct religious objective. The sequence reveals a systematic pattern in which the concealment of identity was not a neutral personal choice but a targeted act that facilitated later coercion. Taken together, these layers of deception, forced religious conformity, humiliation of Hindu symbols, caste based denigration and sexual violence create a composite picture of a crime driven by hostility toward the victim’s Hindu identity. The case meets the criteria of the tracker because the victim herself describes deception, coercion and violence aimed at religious conversion, and because the actions undertaken against her fall squarely within recognised patterns of targeting Hindu women through identity manipulation and forced religious assimilation. Disclaimer: Since the incident does not carry a specific date and only mentions January 2018, a placeholder date of 01 January 2018 has been used as the date of the incident for documentation purposes.
Victim Details
Total Victim
1
Deceased
0
Gender
- Male 0
- Female 1
- Third Gender 0
- Unknown 0
Caste
- SC/ST 1
- OBC 0
- General 0
- Unknown 0
Age Group
- Minor 0
- Adult 1
- Senior Citizen 0
- Unknown 0
Case Status
Unknown
Perpetrators Details
Perpetrators
Muslim Extremists
Perpetrators Range
One Person
Perpetrators Gender
male
Sources 
