Widow Hindu woman trapped, converted, and exploited by a Muslim man in Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh

Case ID : 99583fa | Location : Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh, India | Date of Incident : Fri, 31 December, 2021

Case ID : 99583fa

Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh, India

31 December, 2021

Widow Hindu woman trapped, converted, and exploited by a Muslim man in Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh

Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes

Forced conversion before marriage

Case Summary

A Hindu woman was trapped, converted, and exploited by a Muslim man named Saddam in the Sangipur area of Lalganj tehsil, Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh. Saddam, son of Hamid Ali, a resident of Pichura village, lured a woman named Sarita from Sonia Vihar, Karna Colony, Delhi. He enticed her with promises and took her jewellery worth lakhs and about nine lakh rupees in cash. After bringing her to Pratapgarh, he forcibly converted her to Islam, married her, and spent her money on purchasing farmland and a house. Sarita, who had lost her husband to illness in 2022 and was raising a son and daughter, stated that Saddam had initially been a tenant at her residence. Over time, he gained her trust and eventually drew her into his trap. Once converted, she was subjected to harassment not only by him but also by his family. She was later thrown out of the house, while Saddam began preparing for another marriage. On her complaint, a case was registered under IPC sections 323, 504, 506, 406, 354B, along with Section 3/5 (1) of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021. The police arrested Saddam from Pichura Mor after he had been absconding since 16 August 2025. The incident triggered outrage among Hindu organisations, who demanded strict action. BJP leader Pankaj Gana stated that an agitation would be launched if the woman did not receive justice. According to Sangipur SHO Manish Kumar Tripathi, the case was under investigation, and further action would be based on evidence.

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: Forced conversion before marriage. 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. This case has been added to the tracker because the widow Hindu woman was first lured into a relationship, forcefully converted and married, and then abandoned by the Muslim man. The crime cannot be seen merely as fraud or betrayal in a personal relationship, because the woman’s religious identity was made central to the perpetrator’s actions. What began as a relationship of trust, where Saddam presented himself as a tenant and later as a partner, quickly shifted into a structured pattern of coercion. The Hindu woman, Sarita, was first deceived through false assurances of companionship. Once her trust was won and her financial resources had been extracted, he compelled her to abandon her Hindu identity and accept Islam as a precondition for marriage. This aligns with the first pattern in such cases: when a Hindu woman is in a relationship knowing the man’s faith but is later forced to convert under pressure. The religious element here was not incidental; it was fundamental. The exploitation was layered. First came deception, then financial extraction, then religious coercion, and finally abandonment when her utility was exhausted. The woman’s Hindu identity was the very reason she was targeted for conversion, and the violence lay in erasing that identity through coercion. The forced religious conversion transformed the act from a private betrayal into a hate crime, because it deliberately sought to undermine and erase her Hindu affiliation. Saddam’s plan was not only to strip her of wealth and dignity, but to compel her into a religious identity against her will, showing how gendered violence and religious hostility intersected in this crime. The sequence of events confirms why such incidents must be categorised as hate crimes, rather than simply personal disputes. Disclaimer: Media reports indicate that the victim entered into a relationship with the perpetrator prior to their marriage, though neither the exact date nor the year of its beginning is specified. For the purpose of documentation, we have taken January 1, 2022, as a notional date to signify the start of her ordeal. Although news coverage of the incident surfaced on August 19, 2023, the Hinduphobia Tracker records the case from the point at which the victim’s exploitation commenced, not from the date of media reporting. Disclaimer: The victim count in this case has been set to three, as the woman was also raising two children who were directly impacted by the crime.