On Wednesday, 11th September, a special court in Uttar Pradesh that heard cases of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and UP Anti-Terror Squad (ATS), awarded life sentences to Maulana Umar Gautam and 11 others. These accused persons had been convicted for carrying out over 1,000 illegal religious conversions. Apart from them, 4 others, Rahul Bola, Abdul Mannan alias Munnu Yadav, Mohd Atif alias Kunal Ashok Choudhary, and Mohd Salim were convicted by the Lucknow court on Tuesday, 10th September. They were each awarded 10 years of prison sentence.
Those who have been awarded life sentences have been identified as key accused Umar Gautam, Arshan Mustafa alias Bhupriya Bando, Adam alias Prasad Rameshwaram Kovere, Mufti Qazi Jahangir Qasmi, Kaushar Alam, Faraz Babullah Shah, Irfan Sheikh, Salahuddin Zainuddin Sheikh, Dheeraj Govind, Mohd Kaleem Siddiqui, Mohd Salim, Sarfaraz Ali Jafari, and Abdullah Umar.
They have been convicted under sections 417 (cheating), 153-A (promoting disharmony, enmity, or feelings of hatred between people on religious grounds), 153-B (making or publishing statements that promote disharmony on religious grounds), 295A (deliberate and malicious acts that are intended to outrage religious feelings by insulting a religion or religious beliefs), 121 (conspiring to overawe, using criminal force, the central government or any state government), 123 (concealing facts with intent to facilitate design to wage war) of the Indian Penal Code, and also under other relevant sections of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act.
#WATCH | Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh DGP Prashant Kumar says "On June 20, 2021, a case was registered in connection with illegal religious conversion. Two people were named in it, namely Mohammad Umar Gautam and Mufti Jahangir Alam Qasmi, who used to run an Islamic Da'wah Center in… pic.twitter.com/igXWWlHXdP
— ANI (@ANI) September 11, 2024
The sentences were pronounced by NIA/ATS court judge Vivekanand Saran Tripathi following debates about the magnitude of punishments. The attorney said that all 16 prisoners were taken before the court from the Lucknow district jail around 12.30 pm on Wednesday, September 11, and the quantum of the sentence was pronounced at 4.45 pm. He stated that all prisoners were transferred to jail in judicial custody once the quantum of punishment was determined.
As per the reports, the judge mentioned that the criminals’ time in jail would be included in their sentencing. The court further ordered that compensation of Rs 2 lakh each shall be given to the victims of forced religious conversions.
Vulnerable women and specially abled children were the target of Umar Gautam
The prosecution counsel stated that the ATS had charged 17 people in the case, but the legal proceedings against one of the accused, Idris Qureshi, were delayed by the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court, after which his file had been separated and the matter involving him remains pending.
The counsel further said that on June 20, 2021, the ATS disrupted the forced conversion scheme by arresting Umar Gautam, head of the Islamic Da’wah Centre based in Delhi’s Batla House, and Mufti Kazi Jahangir Kasmi, an employee of the center. He stated that 15 others, including Umar Gautam’s son Abdullah Umar, were apprehended during the subsequent inquiry.
Notably, the ploy, which involved the conversion of specially-abled children and other disadvantaged individuals to Islam, was allegedly supported by multinational organisations, including Pakistan’s spy agency, ISI. According to the ATS, nearly 1,000 persons were unlawfully converted in two years before the operation was exposed in June 2021.
⚡⚡BREAKING ⚡ ⚡
— Amit Bhatia I अमित भाटिया (@ameet1012) September 11, 2024
A special NIA-Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) court in Lucknow sentenced 12 individuals, including Islamic preacher Maulana Kaleem Siddiqui and Islamic Da'wah Centre founder Mohammed Umar Gautam, to life imprisonment for their involvement in an illegal religious… pic.twitter.com/nGm3n860As
According to a top ATS official, Umar Gautam targeted vulnerable people by telling them how he converted to Islam from the Hindu Thakur caste. ATS official said that Gautam used to highlight caste prejudice in religion to persuade his audience. The authority stated that the convicts also promised individuals employment if they converted to Islam.
The ATS, during the investigation, recovered a list with names of 31 non-Muslim girls who fell into the conversion trap and most of these girls belonged to the rural areas. Upon questioning, the accused confirmed to the ATS officials that it was easier to brainwash girls living in villages into embracing Islam. They said that these girls are mostly uneducated and belong to lesser privileged families, so it becomes easier to lure them with jobs and financial aid, which was what Umar Gautam exactly did to lure his targets into embracing Islam.
According to ATS, as many as 12 out of the 31 girls who had fallen into the conversion trap were from rural areas. Besides belonging to rural areas in Uttar Pradesh, some women belonged to villages of Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Assam. The gang members gauged the victim’s vulnerabilities and accordingly used it to their advantage to trap the victims and convert them to Islam. Since most of these rural girls belonged to the economically backward class and were financially oppressed, they became easier targets for Umar Gautam and his cartel.
Conversion racket funded by Pakistan’s ISI
OpIndia reported earlier that Umar Gautam and Qasmi planned to first convert the hearing and speech-impaired children into Islam and then put hatred in their minds against other religions. The perpetrators brainwashed the differently-abled children into hating non-Muslims, accepting Islam, and planning to use them as suicide bombers as the scope of retaliation from such children is limited.
Amidst all these startling revelations made in the case, it was also revealed that the entire religious conversion racket was funded by some foreign organisations, including Pakistan’s ISI. In fact, many victims’ families had come forward to narrate how they fell prey to this mass religious conversion racket. The father of a victim named Manu Yadav had alleged that he received a threatening call on his son’s mobile number from Pakistan asking him not to create hindrance in the conversion of his son.
Mohammad Umar Gautam was earlier known by the name of Shyam Prasad Singh Gautam
Notabl, Umar Gautam was earlier a Hindu and was known by the name of Shyam Prasad Singh Gautam. He had shunned his faith in Hinduism and embraced Islam. Born in 1964 in a regal Rajput family from Fatehpur, Shyam Prasad Singh Gautam is a distant relative of former Indian Prime Minister V P Singh. In 1984, Gautam met one Nasir Khan in his neighbourhood in Pratapgarh, who played a key role in Gautam’s conversion to Islam. During that time, Gautam had met with an accident and could not go to college. Khan helped Gautam in attending classes. He also took Umar Gautam to a hospital and brought meals for him from his mess.
This man, Mohd Umar Gautam, convicted today for forced conversion of physically challenged children
— Swati Goel Sharma (@swati_gs) September 11, 2024
Born into a Hindu family, he converted to Islam over fear of hellfire, in his own words
He made hundreds of crores in funding through conversions pic.twitter.com/vSIOXuKETO pic.twitter.com/FBaE2hqauX
Khan, being a devout Muslim, provided books and scriptures on Islamic beliefs to Gautam. Gautam diligently read all the books provided by Khan, which also included books on the Prophet Muhammad, Islamic hadiths, and other doctrines. In 1986, two years after he met Khan, Gautam renounced his Hindu faith and converted to Islam.
Soon after he embraced Islam, he converted his wife and later his mother. From there, started his inexorable quest to convert others to Islam. It is believed that Gautam used every possible means to manipulate his victims to bring them into the fold of Islam in the given case.
The Jeddah chapter of the Aligarh Muslim University, in 2018, felicitated Mohammad Umar Gautam with an award for propagating Islam. “In recognition of his ongoing extraordinary contribution and continued work in spreading Islam with full devotion and steadfastness,” the memento awarded to Gautam for his efforts to convert people into Islam read.
Notably, Gautam’s name has also appeared in the case of conspiracy to assassinate Dasna Devi Temple chief Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati. A detailed report on this case can be read here.
ED filed a case based on ATS investigation
UP ATS had initially filed an FIR in an illegal religious conversion case in June 2021. The authorities later arrested Siddiqui in Meerut following an investigation in September of that year. ATS stated that the arrested individual operated the country’s largest conversion syndicate and that he managed a trust through ‘hawala’ donations.
ATS further stated that Rs 1.5 crore was fraudulently donated from Bahrain and Rs 3 crore from other Gulf countries for this purpose. Kaleem helped Umar and Mufti Qazi with conversion work at the Islamic Da’wah Centre (IDC). Umar and Mufti were arrested in 2021 by the ATS. Maulana Kaleem also established a trust named Waliullah, which undertakes illegal conversion activities under the guise of operating social harmony initiatives around the country.
