Case Summary

A Muslim man and his accomplice abducted a Hindu woman belonging to the Scheduled Tribe community. The victim's father stated that she was targeted for sexual exploitation by the accused The Hinduphobia Tracker managed to access the FIR of this case. The FIR confirmed that the victim is a 23-year-old Hindu woman. According to reports, this incident occurred on 18th November 2025, in the Sahatwar Police Station area. The victim's father filed a complaint stating that a Muslim man named Rehan Khan, alias Ayub, kidnapped the victim with the intention of sexual assault. The accused was helped in his crime by his accomplice, Abhijit Verma of Mudadiha. The Hindu man further added in the complaint that the accused threatened and abused him using casteist slurs. The victim was located four days after she was reported missing near the Sahatwar railway crossing on 22nd November 2025. Due to the seriousness of the crime, the investigation was taken up by the Circle Officer Bansdih, Jaishankar Mishra. After the woman was found, the police arranged for her medical examination and planned to have her statement recorded in court to determine the next steps. Following her recovery, special police teams began searching for the two named accused and conducted raids at their possible locations. Authorities stated that the investigation was ongoing and that action would be taken based on the legal process.

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Why it is Hate Crime ?

This case has been added to the tracker under the first primary category: Hate speech against Hindus. Within it, the sub-category selected is - Anti-Hindu slurs, 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 from 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. The second primary category selected here is: Attack not resulting in death. Within it, the sub-category selected is: Attacked for Hindu identity. In several cases, Hindus are attacked merely for their Hindu identity without any perceived provocation. A classic example of this category of religiously motivated hate crime is a murder in 2016. 7 ISIS terrorists were convicted for shooting a school principal in Kanpur because they got ‘triggered’ seeing the Kalava on his wrist and the tilak that he had put. In this, the Hindu victim had offered no provocation except for his Hindu religious identity. The motivation for the murder was purely religious, driven by religious supremacy. Such cases where Hindus are targeted merely for their religious identity would be documented as a hate crime under this category. This case has been added to the Hinduphobia Tracker as it involves the abduction and sexual exploitation of a Hindu woman, along with religious and caste-based abuse directed at her family. Such cases of abduction and sexual exploitation of Hindu women by Muslim men have ample precedence, often emerging as patterns where coercion, deceit, and predatory intent intersect with communal bias. However, since the victim in this case was an adult woman, the question of consent and the possibility that the relationship may have been voluntary cannot be ruled out in legal terms. Therefore, the father’s complaint alleging abduction and exploitation would be the determining factor in law, subject to evidence and the victim’s own statement. Nonetheless, the religious motive becomes evident from the father’s testimony, wherein he stated that the accused abused him using caste slurs. It can be argued that a caste-specific slur targets the micro-identity of the victim’s family—belonging to the Scheduled Tribe section of Hindu society—and not their broader Hindu identity. However, as far as Abrahamic religions are concerned, micro-identities such as caste, language, or region are irrelevant to the perpetrator’s worldview. The animus is directed at the collective Hindu identity, not its internal distinctions. In this case, while the accused used caste-based abuses, the underlying hostility stemmed from religious animosity toward Hindus. The attack was not a product of personal conflict alone but of a broader prejudice against Hindu identity, manifesting in both the targeting of a vulnerable Hindu woman and the use of caste-based insult as a tool to degrade her faith group as a whole. The intersection of sexual aggression, caste humiliation, and religious hostility turns this into a religiously motivated hate crime, where the victim’s faith and social identity were central to her targeting. Disclaimer- While this tracker acknowledges that two individuals have been named as accused in this case, one is a Hindu male. For documentation purposes, the religion of the perpetrators has been recorded as Muslim since the primary accused, Rehan Khan, is confirmed to be Muslim.