The Allahabad High Court has passed an order (PDF) denying bail to a Muslim man Imtiyaz Ansari who had pretended to be a Hindu, lured a Hindu girl, and then tried to convert her to Islam. The bench of Justice Rohit Ranjan Agarwal highlighted the gravity of the charges against Ansari, which include charges under Sections 420, 467, 468, and 471 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Sections 3/5(1) of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021.
Details of the case: What did Imtiyaz Ansari do
According to the prosecution, Imtiyaz Ansari brought a girl from Delhi to his village – Ladpur Usmanpur. The girl was a Hindu girl, Kumkum – who was a resident of Delhi. In the village, with the help of the Village Pradhan, Nargis Khatoon and her husband Taslim, made a false certificate of the girl, showing her name as Kumkum Bano and the name of her father as Imtiyaz Ahmad and the residential address having been changed from Delhi to Ladpur Usmanpur, and religion being shown as Muslim.
The Additional Advocate General PK Giri revealed during the hearing that Kumkum, daughter of Gopal Nagar and Sushma Devi, was a Hindu girl and was a resident of New Delhi. The girl in her statement under Section 161 of the CrPc that “she had done her senior secondary Class X examination from Government School, Delhi and was working in one factory in New Delhi where she had met the applicant who did not disclose that he was Muslim by religion and was wearing a sacred red thread on his wrist”.
Imtiyaz Ansari, she said, took her to his native village, Ladpur Usmanpur, District- Bareilly, where she came to know that he was a Muslim. She also testified that false documents were created in connivance with the Gram Pradhan showing her as a domicile of his village and her as a Muslim.
The Additional Advocate General PK Giri opposed bail saying that the Hindu girl was being deceptively converted to Islam by fabricating documents and false pretext of the man being a Hindu.
Imtiyaz Ansari has refuted the accusations by claiming that he is being falsely implicated.
What the Allahabad High Court said while denying bail to Imtiyaz Ansari
The Allahabad High Court while denying bail to Imtiyaz Ansari said that from the statement of the girl, it is evident that she was convinced Ansari was a Hindu when he brought her to his native village and that she was shocked to know that he was indeed a Muslim.
The court also observed that Ansari connived with the village Pradhan to prepare false and fabricated documents to not only show her as a domicile of his village but also show her as a Muslim girl.
Denying bail, the court said, “In the instant case, the applicant had misrepresented himself by fraudulent means, that he was a Hindu by religion, while working at a private factory in Delhi and persuaded the girl to come to the native village where the documents were prepared for her conversion to Muslim religion”.
What it means for Hindu victims of ‘love jihad’
The phenomenon of Hindu women being forced to convert to Islam while the Muslim man first pretends to be a Hindu to trap the girl is real, even as the Left dismisses it as a ‘right-wing imagination’.
The case that emerges can broadly be categorized into the following:
- Where a Muslim man pretends to be a Hindu and traps a Hindu woman. Thereafter, his real identity is revealed either as an accident or, when they force the women to convert to Islam. Thereafter, the man proceeds to, more often than not, murder the Hindu woman.
- The Hindu woman and the Muslim man get married, knowing each other’s identity fully well, however, after marriage, torture to convert to Islam ensues.
- A Hindu woman is raped in the name of Islam – the case was most evident in the Kausambhi gang rape case where a minor Hindu girl was raped and asked to beg for mercy in the name of Allah. The perpetrators specifically asked the girl not to beg for mercy in the name of Bhagwan. In these cases, the aim could either be the conversion of the Hindu woman or, it could be seen as a mere punishment being dished out to Kafir women.
- One-sided obsession of a Muslim man with a Hindu girl that ends in murder, rape or torture when the girl refuses his advances. In several cases, the refusal also includes the refusal to convert to Islam, like in the case of Nikita Tomar, however, even without the element of conversion to Islam, these cases have been widely seen as an act of Jihad.
- Where Hindu women or underage girls are married to Muslim men after being raped and converted to Islam. Such cases are most prominent in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and elsewhere. In such cases, one often sees that after the marriage and conversion, the girl says that she has converted to Islam and married the man out of her own free will. One such case was recently seen in Pakistan where a 13-year-old Christian girl was handed over to her 44-year-old abductor, and while the parents wailed, she claimed that she had converted willingly. In such cases, a parallel to UK grooming gangs becomes necessary to understand that the mere statement of the girl cannot and should not get us to assume that there was no angle of Jihad here.
All the categories of crimes against women we see, listed above, point to one stark and daunting reality – the subjugation of non-Muslim women, and their grooming to make them ripe for Jihad (whether that is fighting in Syria or simply inducting them into the fold of Islam for the purpose of increasing population/numbers or for inflicting punishment for being ‘Kafir’), and the tyranny inflicted upon them, including severe brainwashing, is an integral part of ‘Jihad’ itself.
Muslim men pretending to be Hindu and trapping Hindu girls only to later forcefully convert them to Islam is the most common way in which Hindu women are subjugated.
In this case, the court has upheld the facts of the case denying bail to the Muslim man. It is evident that the Muslim man was pretending to be Hindu by wearing a Kalava, which shows his intentions to forcefully convert the girl to Islam. Further, it is also pertinent to note that the conversion took place with the active connivance of the Village Pradhan, bearing testament to the stark reality that it is not only the Muslim man who is responsible in this case but several other members of the Muslim community who actively conspire to subjugate the Hindu woman.
