Muslim 'boyfriend' forces Hindu woman to convert to Islam, abandons her to marry another girl from his own faith, victim commits suicide

Case ID : a4aedef | Location : Hyderabad, Telangana, India | Date of Incident : Sat, 27 January, 2024

Case ID : a4aedef

Hyderabad, Telangana, India

27 January, 2024

Muslim 'boyfriend' forces Hindu woman to convert to Islam, abandons her to marry another girl from his own faith, victim commits suicide

Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes

Forced conversion before marriage

Case Summary

In Hyderabad, a software engineer named Aditi Bhardwaj committed suicide by consuming poison. She was in a live-in relationship with her boyfriend Mohammad Ali, who converted her to Islam and changed her name to Azia Fatima. After getting her pregnant, Ali married a woman of his own religion. The suicide occurred on January 28, 2024. Originally from Bihar, Aditi worked in software engineering in Hyderabad for years. Aditi was planning to marry Mohammed Ali on February 12 in Hyderabad, but Ali betrayed her just before the wedding. Unable to bear the betrayal, Aditi fell into depression, leading to her tragic end.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

This case has been categorised under the sub-category of 'forced conversion before marriage' under the main category- Hate Crimes against women in relationship. 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. The relationship in such cases is mostly 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. In such cases, 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. In this case, since there is no mention of the accused hiding his religious identity from the victim, the Hindu woman must have presumably got into a live-in relationship assuming that their religious identities would not be a hindrance in their love life, however, the Muslim man ultimately pressurised the victim to convert to Islam. He exploited her physically under the false promise of marriage and then abandoned her after she became pregnant with his child, only to marry another woman belonging to his faith. The details make it evident, that the purpose of trapping the victim was only to convert her to Islam, pointing towards a crime with his motivations being driven by religious hate.