Tuition teacher Heena Sheikh forces Hindu students to wear burqa, interact with Muslim boys, follow Islam, arrested
Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, India 
27 July, 2023
Case Summary
From the Umbre village of Rahuri region of Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district, a minor Hindu girl registered an FIR against 8 individuals for trapping her and then forcing her to convert her religion to Islam. The accused persons are Avej Nisar Sheikh, Kaif Sheikh, Sohail Sheikh, Heena Sheikh, Alisha Sheikh, Salim Pathan, Altaf Sheikh and Shakir Sayyed. The Police have also arrested four of these identified accused including two women. The victim girl in her complaint said that she and her friends who were studying in standard 10th had joined tuition classes at the accused Heena Sheikh’s home. The accused teacher allowed other boys from her community to enter the tuition and gather around the classes in the presence of the Hindu girls. She used to ask the girls to be friends with them and speak in Hindi only. The teacher also asked the girls to behave like Muslims and wear burqa. She wanted the girls to stop wearing bangles and applying kumkum on their foreheads. One of the Muslim boys in the tuition named Avej began messaging the victim girl on her phone and forced her to send some of her photographs to him. He urged her to quit the Hindu religion and run away with him. He also cut his hand to blackmail the victim to talk to him and convert to Islam. Around 3-4 girls from the same tuition came forward and accused Avej of trapping them in separate love affairs and then forcing them to convert. Reportedly, the accused tuition teacher Heena helped the boys in attaining the photographs of the Hindu girls. She used to offer them Shirkhurma on Eid and claim that it is mandatory in their religion to click a selfie after having Shirkhurma. Then their images were morphed and misused to blackmail them to be in relation with the Muslim boys.
Why it is Hate Crime ?
There are two distinct threads to this 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. And the other is the Muslim teacher exploiting the fiduciary relationship with the students in order to manipulate them. 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 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 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 transmits the religious doctrine of a competing faith to a Hindu student. The Hindu student is likely to accept what the teacher is transmitting owing to the existence of the fiduciary relationship. The exploitation of the fiduciary relationship to religiously indoctrinated 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. In this specific case, there are multiple ways in which the hate crime was implemented. First and foremost, the Muslim teacher exploited the relationship of trust that she had built with the students to brainwash them into following Islam, behaving like Muslims and wearing a Burqa. Further, she used her influence to ensure that the minor Hindu girls got 'friendly' with Muslim boys who then exploited them to blackmail them and convert them to Islam. In this specifically, there are elements of threats and harassment and also, manipulation and indoctrination. Since the animosity towards the professed religion of the victims is evident and the victims were being targeted specifically for their religious identity and to convert them, this case has been characterized as a religiously motivated hate crime.
Victim Details
Total Victim
4
Deceased
0
Gender
- Male 0
- Female 4
- Third Gender 0
- Unknown 0
Caste
- SC/ST 0
- OBC 0
- General 0
- Unknown 4
Age Group
- Minor 4
- Adult 0
- Senior Citizen 0
- Unknown 0
Case Status
Case sub-judice
Perpetrators Details
Perpetrators
Muslim Extremists
Perpetrators Range
From 5 to 10
Sources 
