By Omar Rashid
New Delhi: While convicting 16 persons in a mass conversion case and sentencing 12 of them to life in prison, a local court in Uttar Pradesh referred to the atrocities suffered by Hindus during the recent political upheaval in Bangladesh and observed that this was an example of the consequences of “demographic imbalance” in the country due to fundamentalist Islam.
While pronouncing life sentences to prominent Islamic scholar Maulana Kaleem Siddiqui and preacher Umar Gautam, the Lucknow court said the convicted persons used unlawful conversion as their “main weapon” as part of “extensive unconventional warfare” against the Indian state.
In the 264-page verdict – a copy of which is with The Wire – special judge of the National Investigation Agency-Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) court Vivekanand Sharan Tripathi took into perspective two books – including a dubious one – a paper on “sub-conventional warfare” by a former Indian army officer, and a recent controversial observation made by a judge of the Allahabad high court on India’s ‘majority’ population possibly turning into a ‘minority’ due to conversions.
Judge Tripathi found the accused persons, especially Siddiqui and Gautam – described as the masterminds of the mass conversion case – guilty of trying to work with the “mindset” of transforming India into a “Dar-ul-Islam” or “House of Islam” through a wide network of illegal conversions.
He concluded that Gautam, Siddiqui and others were inspired by the “fundamentalist Jihadi ideology” of the controversial Islamic preacher of Jamaican origin Bilal Philips and extremist American Islamic preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who was linked to the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.