Hindu woman lured, sexually exploited and forcibly converted by two Muslim brothers

Case ID : 8da1727 | Location : Lalitpur, Uttar Pradesh, India | Date of Incident : Thu, 6 November, 2025

Case ID : 8da1727

Lalitpur, Uttar Pradesh, India

6 November, 2025

Hindu woman lured, sexually exploited and forcibly converted by two Muslim brothers

Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes

Forced conversion after marriage

Brainwashed and/or groomed

Rape and sexual assault/harassment

Blackmailed to convert

Case Summary

In the Nadipura area of Lalitpur, Uttar Pradesh, a Hindu woman named Pratibha Patil was lured, sexually exploited and coerced to convert to Islam by two Muslim brothers named Shahrukh and Azhar. According to reports, the Muslim accused, Shahrukh, initially lured the victim into a love affair in 2017 and married her according to Muslim customs, nikah. However, immediately after marriage, he pressured her to abandon her Hindu identity and convert to Islam. Even the victim's name was changed to Alisha, essentially a Muslim name, and she was forced to live according to Islamic practices. During this period, Shahrukh’s cousin Azhar frequently visited their home. He secretly recorded videos of the victim while she was bathing and used the private videos to blackmail her. He repeatedly sexually exploited her through those videos while pressuring her to leave her husband and marry him. When she resisted, Azhar sent the videos to Shahrukh, who immediately divorced her. With her marriage destroyed, she filed a police complaint against Azhar on 15 April 2025, following which Azhar was arrested and spent around forty days in jail. After his release from jail, Azhar resumed contact with the victim. He lured her into his love trap under false promise of marriage and claimed that he would accept responsibility for the child growing in her womb. He coerced her into signing a marriage agreement on 14 July 2025, assuring her of stability and protection. However, just after three months of marriage he abandoned her and threw her out of the house on 31 October 2025. Azhar, accompanied by his mother Sitarbano and brothers Afzal and Anas, demanded that she pay two lakh rupees as compensation for the money they claimed they had spent on the case filed by the victim against Azhar. Azhar refused to keep either her or their child without the payment, leaving her homeless once again. Subsequently, the victim approached the police, requesting that Azhar either take responsibility for his family or face strict legal action. The Superintendent of Police confirmed that a case had been registered against Azhar and that the investigation was ongoing.

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 subcategory selected is: Forced conversion after marriage. In such cases, a non-Hindu man marries a Hindu woman, and the force/pressure to convert to any Abrahamic faith, like Islam, begins after marriage. 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. 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 man starts to pressure the woman to convert her religion after marriage. 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 situations, there is application of force by the perpetrator, including the denial of the woman’s religious rights. Some of the means by which the woman is forced/pressured to convert include force-feeding beef, being forced to read the Kalma, being forced to wear a hijab, forced to undergo Halala, etc. There are several instances where, after marriage, the woman 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 other sub-category selected is - Brainwashed and/or groomed, with the tertiary category - Rape and sexual assault/harassment. 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. The other sub category selected is- Blackmailed to convert. When Hindu women are in a relationship with non-Hindu men, there are cases where the woman is blackmailed to convert her religion, owing to her religious identity of being a Hindu. Such relationships may be consensual with the religious identity of the non-Hindu man known to the victim, however, there could be cases where the relationship is not consensual and the non-Hindu man starts blackmailing a Hindu woman to convert her religion. In these cases, it is often seen that the Hindu woman is blackmailed with intimate photos and/or videos, threats of harm to her or her family, threats of violence etc. Such cases are driven by specific religious motivations and against the religious identity of the victim and are therefore qualified as hate crimes. This case has been added to the tracker because a Hindu woman was lured, sexually exploited and coerced to convert to Islam by two Muslim brothers, Shahrukh and Azhar. Firstly, Shahrukh lured the victim into a relationship and performed nikah with her. Although the Muslim accused did not conceal his identity, the nature of the relationship suggested that the Hindu woman was initially led to believe that her faith would not be a barrier to their relationship post marriage. Trusting the accused’s assurances, she married him. However, immediately after marriage, the accused pressured her to convert to Islam. While the victim was an adult, the psychological grooming and deception involved, combined with the deliberate targeting of a Hindu woman religious conversion, indicate a clear religious motive. Secondly, pressuring a Hindu individual to discard her religious faith and embrace another is a direct attack on his religious identity and dignity. It was not a matter of personal choice; it was coercion rooted in hostility towards the victim's Hindu identity. Such an attempt reflects religious animosity because the act was not simply about personal differences but about erasing the victim’s Hindu faith, making it a religiously motivated crime. Even her name was changed to Alisha, essentially a Muslim name, which was an attempt to erase her connection to her past Hindu life. It was an assertion of Islamic identity over the Hindu identity. Thirdly, Shahrukh's cousin brother Azhar, secretly recorded obscene videos of the victim through which he blackmailed her and sexually exploited her. His sexual exploitation of the victim was not merely opportunistic or personal; it was rooted in religious animosity and driven by the same ideological motive that guided the initial entrapment. By sexually exploiting her, Azhar asserted religious domination over a Hindu woman in a manner that weaponised her vulnerability as a Hindu. The coercion to leave her husband, convert, and submit to a second nikah, combined with the use of intimate videos to control her, demonstrated that even the sexual exploitation itself served the broader objective of degrading her Hindu identity. Since both the Muslim perpetrators' actions were rooted in religious animosity, this case has been added to the tracker. Disclaimer: The Hinduphobia Tracker records the date of the incident based on when the crime occurred or when the victim's ordeal began. The reports published this case on 5 November 2025. However, the media reports do not specify the exact date of the beginning of the victim’s ordeal. The victim came in contact with the accused in 2017, and on 15 April 2025, the victim filed a complaint against Azhar. Considering these two pieces of information, we are using an indicative date of 15 April 2017 as the date of the incident. This date is used for documentation purposes only and represents the estimated beginning of her ordeal.