Hindu man subjected to death threats and abused with casteist slurs by Muslim man in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh

Case ID : d420f76 | Location : Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India | Date of Incident : Thu, 10 August, 2023

Case ID : d420f76

Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

10 August, 2023

Hindu man subjected to death threats and abused with casteist slurs by Muslim man in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh

Hate speech against Hindus

Anti-Hindu slurs, mocking faith

Violent threats

Attack not resulting in death

Attacked for opposing radicals or trying to save victim

Case Summary

In the Basni village of Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, a Hindu man named Ramprakash was given death threats and abused with casteist slurs by a Muslim man named Rihan Ansari. According to reports, the victim, Ramprakash, works as a senior English lecturer at Subhadra Kumar Inter College and belongs to the Scheduled Caste community. In a complaint filed before the Special Judge under the SC/ST Act, he stated that in August 2023, a Muslim street vendor named Rihan Ansari, son of Husn Ansari and a resident of Madiyahun in Jaunpur district, used to visit his home to sell garments. During these visits, the accused became acquainted with Ramprakash’s wife. Ramprakash stated that the accused transferred money multiple times from his wife’s bank account to his account. When they demanded that the money be returned, the accused began avoiding them. Ramprakash stated that when he later contacted Rihan Ansari over the phone regarding the matter, the accused abused him using casteist slurs and threatened to kill him. He further states that the accused also claimed that he intended to convert Ramprakash’s wife to Islam and marry her. The victim further revealed that the accused continued to issue threats over mobile phone calls. He stated that he had preserved audio recordings of these calls in a pen drive as evidence. According to the victim, he initially reported the matter to the Baragaon police station, but no action was taken at the time. Subsequently, on December 17, 2025, he sent a complaint by registered post to the Police Commissioner seeking action. Following the court’s direction, Baragaon police have now registered a case against the accused under Sections 504 and 506 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 3(1)(d) of the SC/ST Act. Station House Officer Praveen Kumar Singh confirmed that the FIR was registered on the court’s orders and that the allegations are currently under investigation.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

This case has been added to the tracker under the primary category- Hate Speech against Hindus. The subcategory 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 out of 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 other sub-category selected is - Violent threats. Violent threats, explicit, implicit or implied, is the most dangerous form of hate speech since it goes beyond discriminatory and prejudicial language to express the intent of causing harm to an individual or a group of people based on their religious identity and faith. There could be several different kinds of threats that are issued to Hindus based on religious animosity. An explicit threat would mean the direct threat of violence towards an individual Hindu, a group of Hindus or Hindus at large. Physical violence, death threats, threats of destruction of property belonging to Hindus and threats of genocide would mean explicit threats against Hindus for their religious identity. Implicit threats may not be a direct threat but implied through the use of symbols of actions – for example – in the Nupur Sharma case, other than explicit threats, there were also implicit threats when Islamists took to the streets to burn and beat her effigies. It implies that they want to do the same to Nupur Sharma – thereby is considered an implicit threat. Violent threats can be delivered in person, through letters, phone calls, graffiti, or increasingly through social media and other online platforms. It would be important to understand that a threat – explicit or implicit, online or offline – to an individual who happens to be a Hindu does not qualify as a religiously motivated threat. Such a threat, while vile and dangerous, could be owing to non-religious reasons and/or personal animosity. To qualify as a religiously motivated threat, it would need to exhibit an indication that the individual is being targeted for religious reasons and/or owing to his/her religious identity as a Hindu. The second primary category selected here is - Attack not resulting in death. Within it, the sub-category selected is - Attacked for opposing radicals or trying to save victim. In several cases, Hindus are attacked for opposing religiously motivated crimes being committed against a fellow Hindu or simply for voicing an opinion opposing radical elements, who either have in the past or continue to persecute Hindus. In such cases, the initial attack against the victim, against which the Hindu was trying to defend the victim, would also need to be classified as a religiously motivated hate crime. Since the initial crime itself was religiously motivated and the subsequent crime of attempting to save the victim or speaking against the radical elements ends up inviting a violent attack, it would also be classified as a religiously motivated hate crime under this category. This incident qualified as a hate crime because the victim, Ramprakash, who belonged to Scheduled Caste community, was subjected to caste-based abuse, threats, and coercive religious pressure by the Muslim accused. The accused transferred money to the victim’s wife and, when the family demanded its return, began issuing threats, with the intention of converting the victim’s wife to Islam and marry her. A central feature of the incident was the alleged use of caste-based slurs against the victim, who belongs to the Scheduled Caste community. The raising of caste-based slurs clearly demonstrated the religious hostility at play. Some may argue that a caste-specific slur targeted the micro identity of the victims belonging to the Dalit section of the Hindu community and not their Hindu identity itself. However, as far as Abrahamic religions are concerned, the micro identities of caste, region, and language are secondary. It is the religious identity that drove the animosity of the perpetrators against the Hindu victims. In this case, while the accused hurled caste-based abuses at the victim, the animosity stemmed from hostility towards Hinduism and Hindus. The fact that caste slurs were hurled at the victims by the perpetrators made it a religiously motivated hate crime against Hindus. The victim also stated that he was subjected to death threats after he opposed the actions of the accused, particularly the attempts to influence and convert his wife. The escalation from a dispute over financial transactions to threats of violence and declarations about converting the victim’s wife reflected a deeper level of religious hostility. The threats issued against the victim for resisting these actions indicated that the intimidation was not merely personal but tied to religious hostility, where the accused sought to assert pressure over the victim’s family through coercion, fear and violence. Taken together, the sequence of events revealed that the incident was not merely a personal dispute but was rooted in religious animosity. The use of caste-based abuse against a Scheduled Caste Hindu victim, the issuance of death threats, and the intention of religious conversion pointed towards a pattern of intimidation rooted in both caste and religious identity. Such conduct reflected hostility directed at a Hindu Dalit family and demonstrated how coercion, threats and humiliation could be used to pressure vulnerable individuals. Since such actions were rooted in religious animosity, this case has been added to the tracker. Disclaimer: Although the victim, Ramprakash, stated that the accused was pressuring his wife to convert to Islam, it must be noted that his wife was an adult and therefore legally entitled to make her own independent decisions, including regarding her religious beliefs or conversion. At present, there are no publicly available statements from the wife regarding the conversion attempts. Thus, in the absence of her version of events, we are not including her in the victim count. Consequently, for the purposes of documentation, the victim count in this case has been recorded as one, referring only to Ramprakash. Disclaimer: The Hinduphobia Tracker records the date of the incident based on when the crime occurred. The media reports published this case on 13 March 2026. However, the media reports do not specify the exact date of the beginning of the victim’s ordeal, although it is stated that the victim filed a complaint in August 2023. Considering these two pieces of information, we are using an indicative date of 13 August 2023 as the date of the incident. This date is used for documentation purposes only and represents the estimated beginning of the victim's ordeal.