Minor Hindu girl abducted and pressured to convert by Muslim man under pretext of marriage in Kannauj, Uttar Pradesh
Kannauj, Uttar Pradesh, India 
28 November, 2025
Case Summary
A minor Hindu girl was lured into a relationship, kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam before marriage by a Muslim man in Kannauj, Uttar Pradesh. The victim’s father appealed to the Superintendent of Police (SP) for help. According to his complaint, a Muslim man, Zeeshan, from the village of Sharifapur, trapped his minor daughter in a relationship and kidnapped her on 29th November 2025. After a complaint from the victim’s family, the police recovered the girl and placed her in the Asha Jyoti Centre for her safety. It was found that the accused, Zeeshan, was trying to convert the girl to Islam and force her into marriage. The girl’s family brought the matter to the attention of the police, filing a formal complaint at the police headquarters on 9th December 2025. They urged the authorities to take immediate action. The police assured them that an investigation would be conducted promptly. Superintendent of Police Vinod Kumar confirmed that an investigation is underway, with the police recording the girl’s statement. He assured that appropriate action would be taken based on the facts that emerge from the investigation. City Kotwali Inspector Jeetendra Pratap Singh mentioned that the girl has been recovered, and the accused has been sent to jail. The investigation is ongoing.
Why it is Hate Crime ?
The primary category in this case is: Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes. The subcategory under this is: Brainwashed and/or groomed. The tertiary category under this is: 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 hate crimes. The second primary category in this case is: Predatory Proselytisation. The subcategory under this is: Proselytisation by grooming, brainwashing, manipulation or subtle indoctrination. The tertiary categories selected under this are: Family claims grooming and Conversion of minor. 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 that 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 the 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 proselytisation, 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. In this case, the victim was a Hindu minor, and she was taken away through deception by a Muslim man whose actions, according to the father’s testimony, were driven by a clear ambition to alter her religious identity. This alone establishes a fundamental threshold of religious hostility because when a minor Hindu girl is targeted, emotionally trapped, and then abducted with the stated intention of converting her religion, the crime cannot be viewed as a simple interpersonal dispute or a routine missing person situation. It instead reflects a larger pattern that has been repeatedly documented, where abductions of Hindu girls by non-Hindu men are accompanied by narratives of religious conversion, misrepresentation of identity, lure of marriage, and the systematic erasure of the girl’s Hindu identity. The father explicitly stated that when he refused to convert, the Muslim accused took the girl away to erase her religious identity and force her into marriage, which is not a casual statement. It signals a pattern of predatory behaviour that exploits the social vulnerability of minors, the absence of informed consent, and the fragility of girls who are not equipped to decode hidden intentions behind fake romantic interest. When the victim is a minor, any form of supposed consent becomes meaningless from the standpoint of law, psychology and ethics, because minors do not possess the agency or maturity to evaluate grooming, indoctrination, or religious manipulation. The crime becomes aggravated when the purpose of the deception is not interpersonal gratification alone, but the imposition of a new religious identity upon the victim. In these circumstances, the crime gains a communal dimension because the perpetrator is intentionally targeting the Hindu identity as the axis of exploitation. The use of romantic pretence and emotional bonding is a mechanism to weaken the victim’s capacity to resist, and it embeds the conversion process inside psychological dependence. This matches documented patterns where Muslim men utilise romance as a conversion tool, where marriage becomes the bait, and where religious identity becomes the battlefield. Zeeshan's action also indicates premeditation, because first he contacted the victim's father and tried to convince him to embrace Islam. Hence, this is not an impulsive act but a planned targeting of the religious identity of the Hindu family. In such cases, the intention is not limited to sexual access, but to religious imposition. Therefore, this case has been added to the tracker because the accused used the pretext of marriage as an instrument of religious conversion of a Hindu minor. It becomes a religious hate crime because the Hindu identity of the victim was the axis of selection, the reason for targeting, and the object that the perpetrators intended to destroy. Disclaimer: The Hinduphobia Tracker records incidents based on when an event occurred or when the victim's ordeal began. It is important to clarify that none of the media sources covering this case has specified the exact date when the victim was lured into the relationship. Therefore, for documentation purposes, we have recorded the date based on when the abduction occurred: 29 November 2025.
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
One Person
Perpetrators Gender
male
Sources 
