Muslim man poses as Hindu, forces Hindu mall worker to convert to Islam and marry him

Case ID : f5a73ca | Location : Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India | Date of Incident : Sun, 4 June, 2023

Case ID : f5a73ca

Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India

4 June, 2023

Muslim man poses as Hindu, forces Hindu mall worker to convert to Islam and marry him

Crimes against women in relationships and other sexual crimes

Man pretends to be Hindu

Name Changed

Forced conversion before marriage

Forced to do Nikah

Case Summary

One Muslim male, identified as Arbaaz, was taken into custody by the Madhya Pradesh Police for tricking a Hindu woman into a relationship. The accused pretended to be Hindu and coerced the Indore mall worker into getting married and converting to Islam. The accused wanted to convert her religion, the woman claimed in a police complaint she filed against him.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

There are two distinct elements in this particular case that demonstrate that the Muslim perpetrator committed the crime while harbouring a bias against the Hindu faith. The first factor is that the accused pretended to be a Hindu to deceive the Hindu woman. 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. Further, he forced the Hindu victim to convert to Islam against her will. In such cases, a non-Hindu man is in a relationship with a Hindu woman when the pressure to convert her religion begins to manifest. The relationship in such cases is mostly consensual and the religious identity of the perpetrator is known to the Hindu woman in the relationship, however, at some point during the relationship, the non-Hindu man starts to force the victim to convert her religion and give up her Hindu religious identity. In such cases, the methods used to force the victim to convert her religion often revolve around force-feeding beef, forcing her to wear hijab, forcing her to read the Kalma or even pressurizing the victim to do ‘Nikah’, which is marriage under Islamic law, with a prerequisite being conversion to Islam. Cases where a Hindu woman consensually converts to Islam in a relationship will be left out of the hate crime database, even though it could be argued in several cases that the conversion was a result of religious brainwashing. Since the religious motive of the crime is evident from the above-stated facts, this case has been documented as a hate crime.