17 year old Hindu girl commits suicide after two Muslim youths and one Muslim girl forces her to convert to Islam
Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh, India 
19 October, 2023
Case Summary
A minor Hindu girl committed suicide in the Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh. The father of the deceased has accused Adnan Aftab, Abdul Qayyum along with a girl named Annu Singh of forcing his daughter to commit suicide. The police have registered an FIR in this case and taken all three accused into custody. The incident took place on Friday (October 20, 2023). This incident took place in the Kotwali Dehat police station area of Sitapur district. The father of the deceased has filed a complaint at the police station in this matter. In the complaint, he said that he had gone to work on Friday. Meanwhile, his wife went to school to bring the children. When the deceased's mother returned home at around 10:45 in the morning, she found her 17-year-old daughter hanging. By the time the girl was brought down from the noose, she had already died. In the complaint, the father of the deceased alleges that his minor daughter was being harassed by Adnan Aftab, Abdul Qayyum along with a girl named Annu for a long time. All of them together put pressure on the victim to convert to Islam, due to which she often remained under mental stress. On behalf of the victim's family, an FIR for molestation was also lodged against Adnan and Qayyum on August 14, 2023. Then both the accused molested the victim who was returning from school. Both were arrested and legal action was also taken in this case. The victim's father further told that both the accused had gone to jail in the FIR lodged by him. After a few days, when both of them were released from jail, they started pressuring the girl to compromise in the case. When the girl refused, threats were made to make her edited photo video viral. According to the girl's father, the accused had given her two options - first to accept Islam and second to die. Saying that his daughter was very troubled by these threats, the father of the deceased has attributed this pressure as the reason for suicide. OpIndia has the FIR copy. Finally, on October 20, the girl committed suicide by hanging herself. On the complaint of the victim's father, the police registered an FIR against Adnan Aftab, Annu and Abdul Qayyum under sections 306 and 506 of the IPC. All three accused have been taken into custody. Police are investigating the matter. OpIndia has pictures of Aropita Annu. In the pictures, she is seen in a hijab. In another picture, she is seen standing in front of an Islamic place of worship. Journalist Abhimanyu Singh of Sitapur district sent a video of his conversation with the father of the deceased to OpIndia. In the video, the victim's father said that the three accused were continuously harassing his daughter by calling her. The father of the deceased has also demanded to run a bulldozer on the house of the three accused. In the first FIR lodged by the deceased, the girl's lawyer said that the accused, Abdul Qayyum and Aftab, often carried out molestation incidents by posing as Hindus. All of them used to tie Kalava, etc. He said that only after the statement given by the girl against the accused in court did all the accused go after her. The lawyer described this incident as 'love jihad' and expressed hope of strict action from the administration. The lawyer claimed that at least 5 to 10 thousand girls in Sitapur and surrounding districts have become victims of 'Love Jihad' who have been targeted by a gang. He said that many of these girls have even converted to the religion.
Why it is Hate Crime ?
Two distinct elements in this particular case demonstrate that the Muslim perpetrators committed the crime while harbouring a bias against the Hindu faith. The first component which proves that the offence was committed coupled with a religious bias is that the perpetrators exploited the victim's familiarity with them to pressure her to convert to Islam, by deploying threats and harassment. In this case, the victim's father testified that the Hindu girl could not take in the pressure and decided to end her life. Because of the case's specifics, we have put this case under the prime category: Predatory Proselytization and to narrow down the search further we have chosen the subcategory 'suicide after pressure to convert' under the core category. When there is pressure, threat or coercion employed upon the Hindu victim to convert to a different religion, in several cases, owing to the humiliation or pressure/threat, the victim commits suicide. In such cases, the pressure/threat/intimidation/coercion/violence itself is driven by animosity towards the victim’s Hindu faith. The pressure/threat that is employed leads to the Hindu victim taking his own life. Since the victim’s faith is at the heart of the pressure to convert and the ensuing suicide by the victim, such cases are considered religiously motivated hate crimes. Secondly, the religious motive of the Muslim perpetrators became apparent in this case from the fact that they actively hid their religious identity to deceive several Hindu girls. The fact that the perpetrators targeted not one but many Hindu girls indicates that the central aim of the perpetrators was to disenfranchise the Hindu women from their professed faith. When a non-Hindu man pretends to be a Hindu to deceive a Hindu woman into a relationship, the act is seen as triggered by malafide intentions. In some cases, the woman eventually accepts the man’s original religious identity and converts after the man’s identity is revealed. These cases could be argued as cases of religious brainwashing and a result of the pressure a woman feels after getting into a relationship with a man. The woman, it can be argued, also changed her religious identity because of the stigma she believes she might face if she chooses to walk out of a deceptive relationship. However, for the purpose of documenting hate crimes, the cases in this subcategory are limited to those where there is explicit violence aimed at religious conversion against the wishes of the victim (force-feeding beef, blackmailing with intimate videos, rape on refusal to convert, etc), or if the woman herself complains of the man’s religious deception. In such cases, it is established that the deception of the non-Hindu man had a specific aim of religious conversion or targeting of the victim due to her Hindu religious identity, therefore, making it a religiously motivated hate crime.
Victim Details
Total Victim
1
Deceased
1
Gender
- Male 0
- Female 1
- Third Gender 0
- Unknown 0
Caste
- SC/ST 0
- OBC 0
- General 0
- Unknown 1
Age Group
- Minor 1
- Adult 0
- Senior Citizen 0
- Unknown 0
Case Status
Arrested
Perpetrators Details
Perpetrators
Muslim Extremists
Perpetrators Range
From 2 To 5
Perpetrators Gender
both
Sources 
