Minor Hindu girl abducted and pressured for religious conversion by Muslim men in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh

Case ID : d327910 | Location : Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, India | Date of Incident : Sat, 21 February, 2026

Case ID : d327910

Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, India

21 February, 2026

Minor Hindu girl abducted and pressured for religious conversion by Muslim men in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh

Predatory Proselytisation

Harassment, threats, coercion for conversion

Proselytisation by grooming, brainwashing, manipulation or subtle indoctrination

Conversion of minor

Case Summary

In the Patwai area of Rampur district, Uttar Pradesh, a minor Hindu girl was kidnapped by two men from the Muslim community and taken hostage for the purpose of forced religious conversion. According to media reports, this incident came to light when the girl's family and Hindu organisation workers filed a complaint against the Muslim accused. Officials of the Dharma Prasar Department of Vishwa Hindu Parishad submitted a memorandum at Patwai police station stating that two individuals from the Muslim community kidnapped a minor Hindu girl. They stated that the girl was held hostage for forced religious conversion. The memorandum demanded the immediate recovery of the Hindu minor. More than 24 hours passed since the kidnapping, and the minor Hindu girl had not been located at the time of reporting. The girl's family submitted a written application at Patwai police station demanding action and the recovery of their daughter. Police arrested the village head in connection with the kidnapping and conversion attempt. His interrogation remained ongoing. He was taken into custody for involvement in the case. Vishwa Hindu Parishad activists issued a 24-hour ultimatum to the police, demanding that the perpetrators be arrested within that period. They stated that if action was not taken, thousands of Hindu activists would protest on the streets and that responsibility would lie with the government. Police investigation remained ongoing, and efforts to locate the minor Hindu girl continued.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

The primary category here is "Predatory Proselytisation". The sub-category for this case is ''Harassment, threats and coercion for conversion". 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. 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. Another sub-category for this case is "Proselytisation by grooming, brainwashing, manipulation and subtle indoctrination". The tertiary category here is "Conversion of minor". Religious brainwashing essentially means the often subtle and forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up their religious beliefs to accept contrasting regimented ideas. Religious grooming or brainwashing also involves propaganda and manipulation. It involves the systematic effort, driven by religious malice and indoctrination, to persuade “non-believers’ to accept allegiance, command, or doctrine to and of a contrasting faith. Cases of such grooming or brainwashing are far more nuanced than direct threats, coercion, inducement and violence. In such cases, it is often seen that there is repeated, subtle and continual manipulation of the victim to induce disaffection towards their own faith and acceptance of the contrasting faith of the perpetrator. While subtle indoctrination is widely acknowledged as predatory, an element which is often understated in such conversions or the attempts of such conversion is the role of loyalty and trust which might develop between the perpetrator and the victim. Fiduciary relationships are often abused to affect such religious conversion. For example, an educator transmitting religious doctrine of a competing faith to a Hindu student. The Hindu student is likely to accept what the teacher is transmitting owing to existence of the fiduciary relationship. The exploitation of the fiduciary relationship to religiously indoctrinate victims would also be included in this category. Since the underlying animosity towards the victim’s faith forms the basis of predatory proselytization, such cases are considered religiously motivated hate crimes. This case is a clear case of a religiously motivated hate crime as the two Muslim men abducted a minor Hindu girl in the Patwai area of Rampur district, Uttar Pradesh, specifically to hold her hostage for forced religious conversion. In this case, the victim's status as a minor eliminated any possibility of genuine consent or heartfelt change from the outset. Young minors remain acutely vulnerable to manipulation and coercion due to their age and inexperience, lacking a full grasp of the lifelong consequences of abandoning their faith for another. The Muslim perpetrators exploited this vulnerability with ruthless precision, kidnapping her to impose conversion by force, which exposed their coercion as rooted in religious animosity and cemented its status as a hate crime. Abducting a minor Hindu girl from the safety of her home for religious conversion inflicted profound harassment and coercion, wrenching her from familial protection into captivity where resistance meant terror. This violent uprooting stripped her of agency, subjecting her tender years to psychological torment and isolation solely to break her Hindu spirit, transforming the act into sustained religious persecution. Forcing religious conversion itself constituted a grave hate crime, savagely violating the victim's sacred right to religious autonomy and her freedom to embrace Hinduism without interference. The perpetrators' relentless drive to strip away her Hindu identity through abduction and compulsion revealed their deep-seated religious animosity towards her faith. They meticulously targeted her specifically because she was Hindu, seeking to obliterate her devotion to Hindu deities, rituals, festivals, and ancestral traditions that defined her spiritual core. This calculated effort aimed not just at physical control but at psychologically dismantling her religious worldview, erasing her sacred ties to Hinduism's scriptures, temples, and community practices, and forcibly remoulding her into their own faith against her will. Such premeditated destruction of her Hindu essence, driven by profound contempt for her beliefs, defined this unequivocally as religiously motivated hatred. Overall, this case met every parameter of a religiously motivated hate crime through targeted abduction, exploitation of minors' vulnerability, coercive conversion, and faith-based persecution. Therefore, it was added to the hate crime database of the Hinduphobia Tracker. Disclaimer: The Hinduphobia Tracker records the dates of incidents based on when the crime occurred rather than when it was reported by the media. In this case, media reports did not specify the exact date when the victim's ordeal began or when she was kidnapped. They only stated that the incident was reported after 24 hours. Since the exact date remained unspecified, the media reporting date, 22 February 2026, was selected as the indicative incident date. This was recorded for documentation purposes only. In this case, along with the two main Muslim perpetrators behind the kidnapping and forced conversion, the village head was also involved and was arrested by police in connection with the matter. Therefore, the perpetrator count was recorded as three for documentation purposes only.