A local court in Surat denied bail to a 51-year-old man called Muhammad Samat Ali Sheikh who had disguised himself as Mukesh Mahavir Gupta and married a Hindu girl from the Dindili region. At the time, Sheikh claimed to be a Railway employee, reports Desh Gujarat.
After a few months of marriage, the victim Hindu girl realized that her husband was not Hindu. She was subsequently forced to convert to Islam and perform Namaz. Feeling harassed, the victim filed a complaint at the Dindoli police station of Surat. The police filed an FIR against the accused and charged him under the Freedom of Religion Act and other relevant sections of the IPC.
Since then, the accused has been held in judicial custody. The accused sought release for 30 days on medical grounds, but the government’s lawyer, RP Dobariya, had opposed it. The court in its order rejected the plea of the accused seeking bail.
The menace of Love Jihad (Grooming jihad) has been rapidly spreading its tentacles across many parts of the country, where vulnerable Hindu women are being targeted by Muslim men, enticed and misled, forcibly converted to Islam, tortured, raped, and then either killed or abandoned.
To combat this grave threat, many states, including Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, and Karnataka, have enacted stringent laws that criminalise Love Jihad and other forms of illegal conversions. Still, several incidents continue to emerge every other day from every nook and corner of the country where susceptible and vulnerable Hindu women are being targeted and exploited in the name of ‘love’.
OpIndia has consistently been at the forefront of reporting incidents in which vulnerable Hindu women are groomed to accept their own subjugation at the hands of Muslim men. When the year 2022 came to an end, OpIndia reported as many as 153 instances of ‘Love Jihad’ or ‘Grooming Jihad’ we documented last year.
