Muslim cricket coach rapes Hindu girl since she was 17, converts her to Islam, threatens her father with death

Case ID : c8b7eea | Location : Rajkot, Gujarat, India | Date of Incident : Sun, 25 June, 2023

Case ID : c8b7eea

Rajkot, Gujarat, India

25 June, 2023

Muslim cricket coach rapes Hindu girl since she was 17, converts her to Islam, threatens her father with death

Predatory Proselytisation

Harassment, threats, coercion for conversion

Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes

Brainwashed and/or groomed

Conversion of minor

Rape and sexual assault/harassment

Case Summary

Mehboob Bukhari, a cricket coach in Rajkot, was detained for raping a Hindu girl who has since disappeared. He is accused of subjecting the victim to prolonged sexual abuse starting from her teenage years. Mehboob Bukhari sexually exploited the minor girl under the guise of ‘love’. Mehboob changed the girl's name to Nazneen and forced her to convert. The police took swift action following the revelation, apprehending the accused and launching an intensive search operation to locate the girl missing since June 26, 2023. With the goal of becoming a cricket player, the Talaja-born victim had enrolled in Mehboob Bukhari's coaching academy at 17. According to the family of the victim girl raped by cricket coach Mehboob in Rajkot, the girl would often say, "My life is ruined now. If I marry someone else, Mehboob will kill me." Due to Mehboob’s instigation, the victim stole gold ornaments worth Rs 1.5 lakh and cash from her house and gave it to him. "Our daughter, who used to chant Jai Dwarikadhish, started offering namaz and shouting slogans of Allahu Akbar", the victim's family members said. She started wearing a burqa and offering Namaz. When the girl’s father went to talk to Mehboob, he threatened to break his hands and legs and kill him. According to him, Mehboob said, "I have been raping your daughter since she was 17, do whatever you can."

Why it is Hate Crime ?

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. In this subcategory, we would only include cases where the victim was harassed, threatened or coerced to convert. Cases where attempts were made to convert but the victim resisted would be documented in another sub-category. 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. This case is a distinct case of religiously motivated hate crime as the Muslim perpetrator employed threat and coercion to attempt to get the Hindu victim to give up her professed faith and accept Islam, an alien faith for her. In order to pressure her into conversion, the accused terrorised her by subjecting her to physical abuse. He threatened her father with death, to exert mental pressure and scare the victim so that she was compelled to abide by whatever the accused asked him to do. She herself testified that she converted and followed Islamic practices like wearing a hijab and offering Namaz because she was scared that her Muslim perpetrator would harm her and her father physically if she did not accede to his conversion demands. All the harassment and coercion the perpetrator subjected the victim to was clearly because he wanted her to renounce her professed faith and accept Islam. This is clearly done when the perpetrator holds disdain for the victim's professed faith, which is Hinduism and harbours a clear intention to proselytise the Hindu victim. In this case, there is an additional element of grooming and conversion of a minor. 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. In this case, the victim was 17 and the perpetrator sexually exploited the victim in the name of being in love with her. Sexual relations with a minor is illegal ab initio since the minor does not have the agency to offer consent. Further, the perpetrator also groomed her to accept Islam where she started following Islamic practices. She was also scared for her life if she got married to someone else. All of these element point towards the grooming of a minor by the perpetrator.