By Omar Rashid
New Delhi: The anti-conversion law in Uttar Pradesh was introduced by the Bharatiya Janata Party government in 2020 in the backdrop of a concerted campaign by the saffron party against ‘love jihad’. A legally undefined, unrecognised and Islamophobic right-wing conspiracy theory, the ‘love jihad’ bogey accuses Muslim men of using deception to seduce Hindu women as part of a concerted effort to convert them to Islam.
Under this theory, the Muslim man is projected as the villain and the Hindu woman is the gullible victim. In recent weeks, however, two cases have come to light from Uttar Pradesh’s Fatehpur and Bijnor where Muslim women and their male relatives have been accused of luring Hindu men to convert to Islam through the promise and allurement of marriage.
In both cases, the Hindu men belonged to the Jatav Dalit community. And in both cases, the criminal complaints were lodged by the fathers of the Hindu men.
On February 28, police in Fatehpur’s Malwan lodged a criminal case against a Muslim man Taufeeq, aged 28, his father Hakim Shah, their relative Imtiyaz and a local cleric Maulvi Azam Khan for allegedly converting a Hindu boy to Islam and trying to get him married to Taufeeq’a sister Shabnam through Muslim rituals.
The four men were booked under Sections 3 and 5 (1) of The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021. They were also charged with criminal intimidation, breach of peace and wrongful confinement.
The case was lodged on the complaint of Ram Prasad, the boy Ram Manohar’s father. Prasad said that his son had been working in Haridwar for the last 4-5 years. In Haridwar, Ram Manohar met Taufeeq, said Prasad, alleging that with time Taufeeq started offering him the “allurement” of marrying his sister.
Prasad alleged that Taufeeq would make his sister talk on the phone with Ram Manohar. In his police complaint, however, Prasad also acknowledged that he had not been in touch with his son for a while. He also did not have any recent information about Ram Manohar’s life.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.