Hindu man lured into marriage and tortured for conversion by Muslim woman and her family faking Hindu identity

Case ID : 45f5047 | Location : Dhamtari, Chhattisgarh, India | Date of Incident : Sun, 31 December, 2017

Case ID : 45f5047

Dhamtari, Chhattisgarh, India

31 December, 2017

Hindu man lured into marriage and tortured for conversion by Muslim woman and her family faking Hindu identity

Men attacked for being associated with non-Hindu women

Forced to convert after marriage

Torture of family to force man to convert

Brainwashed and/or groomed

Victim admits being brainwashed/groomed

Case Summary

A Muslim woman concealed her religious identity, presented herself and her family as Hindu, and married a Hindu businessman from Dhamtari district in 2018, according to Hindu rituals. Later on a son was born to the couple. After the marriage, the wife’s father took the husband to a dargah in Adhari Navagaon, claiming that evil spirits affected both of them and that visiting the dargah every Thursday would remove the negative influence and improve his business. The husband followed this for seven to eight months, during which his business suffered losses. He then discovered that his wife and her parents were Muslim and had deliberately misrepresented themselves as Hindu to arrange the marriage. Upon learning the truth, the husband stopped going to the dargah and prevented his wife from going to her parental home for that purpose, while the wife insisted on continuing the ritual. She and her parents began pressuring the Hindu man to convert to Islam. When he refused, the wife’s behaviour changed completely; she started quarrelling daily and abusing him verbally. On 25 September 2019, during an argument, the wife poured kerosene on herself and attempted to set herself alight in an effort to commit suicide. The husband managed to stop her and save her life. Shortly afterwards, she left for her parents’ house. Fed up with her conduct, the husband filed for divorce in the Family Court on grounds of mental cruelty, including the fraud regarding religion and the repeated suicide threats. After hearing both parties, the Family Court granted the divorce. The wife appealed to the Chhattisgarh High Court, claiming that the husband no longer wished to live with her and had therefore levelled false and baseless allegations that she had not voluntarily left the matrimonial home, and that the husband had thrown her out and refused to keep her. The husband reiterated that after he refused to visit the dargah or convert, the wife and her family mentally harassed him, the wife repeatedly threatened suicide, and on one occasion, actually attempted it by pouring kerosene on herself. The Division Bench of the High Court observed that repeatedly threatening suicide amounted to cruelty toward the spouse, as no husband or wife could live peacefully under constant such threats. The court held that mental cruelty is a state of mind caused by the behaviour of one spouse toward the other, and that it is difficult to prove directly, unlike physical cruelty. The wife’s actions – including the fraud about her religion, persistent pressure to convert, abusive behaviour, and the suicide attempt, coupled with repeated threats – were grave enough to cause the husband severe mental pain and apprehension that it was harmful to continue living with her. Finding sufficient evidence that the wife had repeatedly threatened suicide and had attempted it once, and noting that the couple had been living separately since 2020, the High Court dismissed the wife’s appeal and upheld the Family Court’s decree of divorce.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

This case has been added to the tracker under the primary category: Men attacked for being associated with non-Hindu women. The first subcategory selected is: Forced to convert after marriage. In such cases, a non-Hindu woman marries a Hindu man, and the force/pressure against the Hindu man to convert to Islam begins after marriage. In such cases, the marriage is consensual in most cases, and often, there is no element of the non-Hindu woman hiding her religious identity. The marriage could be under the Special Marriages Act, where neither parties are required to convert their religion for the marriage to be considered legitimate. While the victim in such cases enters matrimony assuming that religious identity is not a barrier, the non-Hindu woman starts to pressure the Hindu man to convert to Islam after marriage. In such cases, there is application of force/pressure by the perpetrator, including, denial of the man’s religious rights. Some of the means by which the man is forced/pressured to convert include forcing/pressurising the man to involuntarily consume beef, pressurising/forcing to read the Kalma, forced circumcision, forcing the man to go to the mosque, etc. There are several instances where, after marriage, the man voluntarily converts to Islam. Such cases are often argued to be a result of religious brainwashing; however, for the purpose of documenting religiously motivated hate crimes, in the absence of the victim complaining of forced conversion, such cases do not form a part of the database. The second subcategory selected is: Torture of family to force man to convert. When Hindu men are in a relationship with non-Hindu women, there are cases where the Hindu spouse is forced to convert to their religion. Several methods are used for such forced conversion. The non-Hindu woman and/or her family, and religious leaders are often documented to issue threats and even employ violence. One of the ways used by such perpetrators is threatening and/or torturing the family members of the Hindu man to pressure him to convert. The perpetrators in such cases issue threats to harm or torture the family of the man. In some cases, there is also violence directed towards the family in order to force the Hindu man to convert. The aim of such crimes is to blackmail the victim into changing his religion by inducing fear of harm to his family. Such cases are driven by specific religious motivations and against the religious identity of the victim and are therefore qualified as hate crimes. The third subcategory selected is: Brainwashed and/or Groomed. The tertiary category selected is: Victim admits being brainwashed/groomed. In our database, we have not added incidents where men 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 man for his 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 incident 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 himself says that he was brainwashed/groomed to convert his religion. However, if the victim is deceased (murdered or otherwise), the case would form a part of this database if his family/friends provided testimony that the victim was brainwashed/groomed to convert his religion. Since these crimes have a distinct religious angle where the victim is being targeted owing to his Hindu religious identity, these cases are considered hate crimes. This case was a clear example of a hate crime committed against a Hindu man solely because of his religious identity. The Hindu man was lured into a relationship and marriage by the Muslim woman and her family by feigning a Hindu identity. After the marriage, the man was coerced by his Muslim wife and in-laws to abandon his faith and embrace. The subtle manipulation started with a concern over the influence of evil spirits over the couple, along with the promise of growth in business if the Hindu man took his wife every week to a dargah. This act was intended to slowly erode the victim's Hindu identity and prepare him for Islamic conversion. The act of manipulating the man to leave his ancestral faith alone points towards the animosity harboured by the Muslim family against the religious identity of the victim. Once the identity fraud was exposed, the targeting escalated from subtle manipulation to verbal and psychological coercion. His Muslim wife started to quarrel daily and abuse him verbally. A constant threat of suicide was posed by the wife to intimidate the Hindu man. This psychological assault was not about personal disagreements but was a direct punishment for refusing to renounce his Hindu faith. By attacking him for resisting conversion, the perpetrators made his mind a battlefield for their animosity towards his religion. This was an overt act of religiously motivated violence, where refusal to submit to Islam was answered with constant harassment and mental torture. In Islam, Muslims are allowed only to form relationships with other Muslims and any relation with non-believers is considered Haram (prohibited), amounting to sin, deserving punishment in hell. The act of forcing the man to leave his ancestral faith alone points towards the animosity harboured by the Muslim family against the religious identity of the victim. Here, the refusal of the Hindu man to convert was seen not just as defiance but as an affront to their Islamic identity, prompting the family of the Muslim woman to escalate their tactics from overt brainwashing to outright abuse and threats, just to induce conversion. The victim was subjected to ongoing harassment intended to crush his resolve. Forcing a man to discard his beliefs and embrace another faith cannot be mistaken for familial conflict—it flows only from targeted religious hatred. The unrelenting pressure, the attempts to break his spirit, and finally the knife attack all pointed towards a systematic attempt to erase his Hindu identity. Since such predatory actions are the result of doctrinal animosity towards the Hindu faith and its adherents, this case is being documented as a religiously motivated hate crime. Disclaimer: Media reports state that the victim’s ordeal began when he met the accused in 2018, though no exact date or month is provided. To document this case, we have used an indicative date: 1st January 2018, as a placeholder to represent the beginning of his suffering.