Maulana and his sons sexually assaulted and forcibly converted a Hindu woman and her daughter to Islam

Case ID : f5a7444 | Location : Prayagraj (Allahabad), Uttar Pradesh, India | Date of Incident : Fri, 10 November, 2023

Case ID : f5a7444

Prayagraj (Allahabad), Uttar Pradesh, India

10 November, 2023

Maulana and his sons sexually assaulted and forcibly converted a Hindu woman and her daughter to Islam

Predatory Proselytisation

Harassment, threats, coercion for conversion

Case Summary

Prayagraj police arrested three youths named Akram, Junaid, and Faizan for forcibly converting a Hindu woman to Islam. Another accused Mushtaq Ali has already died. A case in this matter was registered in the Colonelganj police station of Prayagraj under sections 147 (rioting), 323 (causing hurt), 504 (intentional insult), 506 (criminal intimidation), 342 (wrongful confinement), 354(A) (sexual harassment) of the IPC and sections 3 and 5(A) of the Uttar Pradesh Prevention of Illegal Religious Conversion Act 2021. The victim woman said in her police complaint that Mushtaq Ali and his sons tortured their family and forcibly converted them to Islam by threatening and sexually assaulting them.

Why it is Hate 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. The details of this case reveal that the Muslim perpetrator, to alienate the Hindu victim from her professed faith inflicted torture on her. She was sexually assaulted; her family was tortured and put through mental trauma, all because the perpetrator wanted her to renounce her faith and accept Islam. Since the motivating factor of the crime was the religious identity of the victims and the accused employed violence and intimidation to disenfranchise the victim from it, the case has been included under the sub-category 'harassment, threats, coercion for conversion' within the core category of 'predatory proselytisation'.