On Friday a new case of Grooming Jihad (Love Jihad) was reported from Madhya Pradesh’s Khandwa district where a 21-year-old woman was physically assaulted in Jabalpur, Bhopal, and Burhanpur and was forced to convert to Islam. The accused in the case has been identified as Firdos Khan. The Police registered the case and arrested Khan.
According to the reports, the incident is said to have happened in the Moghat area of Titgaon in the Khandwa district. The accused named Firdos trapped a 21-year-old girl in an affair. He told her that he liked her and that he wanted to marry her. He also asked the girl to change her religion to Islam.
On refusing the proposal of conversion to Islam, the girl was abducted by Firdos who took her to Khandwa Railway station and forced her to accompany him to Jabalpur. On July 1, the duo first reached Khandwa, then Burhanpur and then Jabalpur. The accused also forcefully developed physical relations with the girl during the travel.
On reaching Jabalpur, Firdos kept the girl at his maternal uncle’s place and continued to physically abuse her for around 4 days. The family members of the girl in Titgaon meanwhile lodged a missing complaint on July 1. After the accused brought the girl back to Titgaon, she testified that the accused had physically assaulted her and forced her to convert to Islam.
In the police complaint, she also mentioned that the accused had intoxicated her and had trapped her at his maternal uncle’s place in Jabalpur. The Police reportedly registered an FIR in the case and arrested accused Firdos Maqbool Khan under the relevant sections of the Indian Penal code.
To note, a similar incident of Love Jihad was reported from the state of Jharkhand where a Muslim youth working as a laborer in a factory in Delhi had posed himself as Hindu to lure and marry a Hindu young woman from Azamgarh. The accused identified as Shahzad Ansari abandoned his wife post eight years of marriage after she discovered the truth about her husband’s religious identity.
