The term “Grooming gangs” evokes chilling parallels across many countries, most notably the infamous rape jihad cases in the United Kingdom wherein, for nearly four decades, gangs predominantly comprising Pakistani Muslim men systematically groomed, blackmailed, raped and tortured White Christian and other non-Muslim girls. In India, the disturbing case of sexual exploitation of minor Hindu girls by a Muslim grooming gang in Rajasthan’s Beawar district has refreshed the unhealed wounds of the 1992 Ajmer Scandal.
Muslim grooming gang in Beawar trapped, threatened, raped, blackmailed and pushed Hindu girls to convert to Islam
On 17th of February 2025, the Beawar police busted a gang of illiterate Muslim youths Rehan Mohammad (20), Sohail Mansuri (19), Lukman (20), Arman Pathan (19), Sahil Qureshi (19), and two minors who were trapping Hindu girls, raping them, and forcing them to convert to Islam. These rape jihadis were teaching Hindu girls about namaz, roza, and reciting the Kalma (Islamic declaration of faith). Furthermore, they were pressuring the girls to wear burqas, perform namaz, observe Roza (fast) and brainwash them for conversion to Islam. The accused rape jihadis have been booked under the POCSO Act alongside other relevant provisions.
As per a victim’s testimony, these rape jihadis used to follow Hindu girls studying class 10th at a school in Beawar’s Bijainagar. After coming in contact with the girls over mobile phone they would sexually assault the girls, take explicit pictures and videos of the crime and then use it to further abuse them. The accused would give small mobile phones to the victims.
One of the accused Sohail Mansuri, gave a victim a small mobile phone to communicate with him. He constantly threatened her. Following his insistence, she introduced her friends to Sohail’s friends, namely Riyan, Javed, and Arman. Sohail tormented the Hindu girl into wearing a burqa and taught her about Ramadan and fasting. He reportedly brainwashed her into observing fasts. He cut her hand with a blade and pressured her to recite the Kalma.
The victims said that the men would come in new vehicles, including Bullet motorcycles and other cars, to take them away. One of the victims said, “They once told me that a Brahmin girl would fetch ₹20 lakh if sold, and you (a Dalit) would get ₹10 lakh.” The girls said in their statements that they were continuously blackmailed with obscene photos and videos and forced to bring in other girls.
The case unravelled after a mobile phone was found with one of the girls. When the family called one of the Muslim men, he responded with abuses and threats. The victim’s family rushed to the police station and filed a complaint about the matter, after which the case unfolded layer by layer. The police found that it was not just one victim but multiple girls who had fallen prey. Several Muslim men were involved. They also extorted money from the girls and forced them to steal cash from their homes.
One of the victims from Beawar disclosed that the ‘Muslim gang’ used to pressurise her to go to the local maulvis and mosques. The police has arrested former councillor Hakim Qureshi in Bijaynagar on 23rd February in the case, demonstrating the involvement of several Muslim groups in this gang.
So far 8 accused have been arrested, while three minors have been taken into custody. While the police is investigating the matter, tensions prevail in Beawar as the local Hindu community is outraged over the incident.
The 1992 Ajmer Scandal
The Beawar case inevitably recalls the 1992 Ajmer sex scandal, one of India’s most infamous grooming gang cases. Over several years, a group led by Farooq Chishti and Nafees Chishti who were members of the Khadim families of the Ajmer Sharif Dargah, preyed on 100s of school and college-going Hindu girls aged 11-20. The Khadims claim to be the descendants of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti. The rape jihadis, some of whom were Youth Congress leaders took the victims to remote farmhouses under false pretences, raped them and photographed them to further blackmail and exploit them. The Muslim groomers used the explicit images of their victims to blackmail the girls into bringing in more girls, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of abuse.
It all started with Farooq Chishti grooming a female student of Sophia Senior Secondary School and raping her. He took objectionable photographs of the minor and threatened her to introduce other girls to him. Later, those girls were raped and blackmailed as well. Farooq Chishti was the president of the Ajmer Youth Congress while two other accused, Nafis Chishti and Anwar Chishti were the vice-president and joint secretary respectively of the city Congress unit. In this case, some of the accused were the Chishti Khadims (caretakers) of the Ajmer Dargah.
The horrific sex scandal broke in April 1992 when a local newspaper Dainik Navjyoti published a story, sparking protests. The report written by journalist Santosh Gupta revealed that hundreds of schoolgirls were sexually exploited by the accused. They recorded the sexual assaults and used them to blackmail the girls to bring more girls to them. Daughters of big leaders in Ajmer also became victims of the scandal and the story was published with the title “Daughters of big leaders are victims of blackmail’. As the scandal was exposed, the perpetrators tried to erase evidence.
While the details of how the grooming gang targeted, raped and blackmailed victims came out in public after the Dainik Navjyoti report, justice remained slow and incomplete. It also emerged that the police, CID and the government were aware of the scandal since a year before the report was published, however, no concrete action was taken and investigations were deliberately stalled since many of the perpetrators belonged to the family of Khadims. The police had stalled the case because the local politicians warned action against the accused would lead to massive communal tension.
Digvijay Singh who was the home minister of Rajasthan at that time had seen the obscene photographs 90 days before the report of the scandal came out. After the matter came to light, the police initially attempted to downplay the matter sparking widespread protests. During that period, Inspector General of Police, Omendra Bhardwaj, claimed in a press conference that the scandal was “not as big as publicised”. He also raised questions about the characters of the four girls whose photos were used to blackmail them. He claimed that their character was “suspicious”.
An FIR was registered and during the investigation, it emerged that many of the victims had committed suicide, some refused to come forward, and only a few victims gave statements and continued to fight the case. In 1998, the rights of the accused were sent to life imprisonment. However, four of them were acquitted by the Rajasthan High Court in 2001. In 2003, the other four accused’s sentence was reduced to 10 years. Out of 250 reported victims, only 12 filed complaints. It took the Indian Judicial System 32 years to punish the remaining six culprits as in August 2024, Nafees Chishti, Naseem alias Tarzan, Salim Chishti, Iqbal Bhati, Sohil Gani, and Syed Zameer Hussain were convicted and sentenced to life in jail by a district court.
The love jihad factory in Kerala’s Malappuram: Journey of Hindu girls from building careers to vanishing behind Burqas
Back in 2020, the Syro Malabar Church, The Kerala Catholic Bishops’ Council and many Christian organisations voiced their concerns over the growing number of Love Jihad cases in Kerala. The Christian organisations echoed the concerns raised by Hindu organisations which alleged that there are forces active in Kerala that are targeting young women, brainwashing them in the name of ‘religious studies’, forcefully converting them to Islam and then shipping them off to serve for ISIS as sex slaves. Back then, Fr Varghese Vallikkatt, the spokesperson for the Kerala Catholic Bishops Council(KCBC), had stated that the government ignoring the cases of Love Jihad and not taking action, is nothing but a ‘silent sanction’.
In 2016, cases of systematic love jihad were reported in the media. In July 2016, Mini Vijayan, a military official alleged that her daughter Aparna, had been forcefully converted to Islam. Aparna was traced to Sathyasarani, or the Markazul Hidaya Educational and Charitable Trust in Malappuram. Aparna later appeared before the court and claimed to have converted to Islam and that she did not wish to go back to her mother. It turned out that Aparna had married an auto-driver named Aashiq from Malappuram. Investigations revealed that the literature from fugitive Islamic hate preacher Zakir Naik’s Islamic Research Foundation was widely used to brainwash and radicalise Hindu girls.
In another case involving a Hindu girl named Nimisha, in 2011 Kerala police arrested two persons named Sheena Farzana and Naser, two alleged ‘handlers’ who were recruiting young girls in Kerala to go and ‘work’ for ISIS in Yemen. They were both from Sathyasarani, an organisation run by the now-outlawed Islamist jihadist outfit PFI. Investigations led to the discovery of several other targeted conversions. Nimisha alongside 21 other Hindu girls converted to Islam and married Muslim men who were recruited by the Islamic terrorist group ISIS.
In 2017, when NIA started probing the ISIS link and Love Jihad cases, they found that two Hindu girls, Athira and Akhila (who later became Hadiya) were lured by the same woman, a PFI worker named Sainaba. All these cases had links with the Sathyasarani Trust or the Markazul Hidaya in Malappuram. Documents were found during a raid indicating that around 60 to 70 Hindu and Christian girls were at the Markazul Hidaya for ‘religious studies’ (conversion studies). Many such organisations are operating in Kerala backed with heavy funding. The vote bank politics and the fear of offending the perennially offended coupled with other factors have caused sluggish probes in these cases.
Another such case was reported by a Christian mother from Kerala named Cynthia who said that her daughter Tabitha, who was studying in a gulf nation, had suddenly left after declaring that she wanted to embrace Islam. She eventually established a Bahrain-based Islamic organisation called Discover Islam Society. During a meeting with her mother, a Hijab-clad Tabitha told her mother that she could not live with people who are not Muslims.
Back in 2016, it was reported that between 2011 and 2015, 5,975 people in the state had converted to Islam, of these 1410 converted in 2015 alone.
The Islamo-leftist ecosystem and the so-called ‘secular’ political parties have long been trivialising the menace of love jihad/rape jihad/grooming jihad as a ‘hoax’, ‘fiction’, and ‘BJP-RSS conspiracy theory’ despite there being ample evidence and thousands of cases across the country. Back in 2023, a major controversy erupted when the film The Kerala Story showed how Hindu girls are targeted, brainwashed, sexually abused, threatened and coerced into conversion to Islam and subsequently forced into terror and other illegal activities, the same ecosystem was outraged.
An organisation named Arsha Vidya Samajam has been working for many years in the direction of rescuing the girls who are tapped in ‘Love Jihad’ and bringing them back to their roots, also giving them respect in society and strengthening them mentally.
Rape, threats, forced conversions to Islam and perpetual abuse by rape jihadis in Uttar Pradesh: Locations change modus remains the same
Western Uttar Pradesh has been a hotbed of grooming jihad and other Islamist crimes. In 2020, the Kanpur Police formed a Special Investigation Team after several cases of forced conversions of Hindu women to Islam on the pretext of marriage reported from the city, especially from Kanpur’s Juhi Colony.
In November 2020, the SIT submitted its report to the Kanpur range inspector general, after probing 14 cases lodged in the police stations across the Kanpur district over the last year. Out of 14 cases, the SIT probed 11 criminal cases. In one case, one Fateh Khan pretended to be Aryan Mehrotra to trap a 14-year-old Hindu girl in Kanpur’s Gopal Nagar. The Muslim perpetrator befriended the minor Hindu girl, raped and assaulted her and threatened to harm her parents. The SIT report also revealed that Fateh Khan pressured the victim to convert to Islam and got her Aadhar card made in the name of Mariyam Fatima. The rape jihadi was booked under the POCSO Act alongside other relevant provisions.
In another case, a Muslim man named Mohammed Ubais aka Babu posed as a Hindu to entrap a 16-year-old minor Hindu girl. Ubais with the help of his sister Mahi Hayat Khan. The accused along with his sister tried to brainwash and pressurise the minor victim to adopt Islam. The girl was rescued by her mother and the accused was sent to jail.
Similar cases involving Muslim perpetrators targeting Hindu girls from Naubasta, Govindnagar, Babu Purwa, Chakeri, and Juhi Colony were detailed in the SIT report. In most of these cases, a common modus operandi was found. The Muslim perpetrators would make contact with gullible Hindu girls, befriend them, ensnare them into their love trap, sexually exploit them, record obscene videos and take pictures, threaten and blackmail them, and force them into converting to Islam.
In all 11 cases the SIT probed, they found certain transgressions based on which the accused were arrested and sent to jail. Pertinently, in 7 of these 11 cases, the victims were minors.
Back in 2020, it was reported that a Hindu girl named Shalini Yadav who went missing was found after two months, however, she had converted to Islam and became Fiza Fatima. Shalini Yadav (Fiza Fatima) uploaded a video on Facebook, eloping from her house and telling the story of converting to Islam and getting married to Mohammad Faisal. Shalini’s brother, however, called this a case of love jihad and alleged that a grooming gang was active in the Juhi Colony.
In 2020, it was reported that in just two months, 5 girls ran away from their homes in the Kanpur area with Muslim men. Other than Shalini Yadav, two sisters, residents of Awas Vikas, Kalyanpur fled with accused Shahrukh and another Muslim youth– both residents of Juhi Colony. Similarly, a girl and her younger sister, both residents of Panki Ratanpur Colony – accused Mohammad Mohsin, the case came to light when the younger sister understood the game plan of the Muslim perpetrators.
Grooming Jihad: From United Kingdom to India
The when and how of some of the major grooming gang cases have been discussed, however, the rampancy of such cases warrants a discussion on the “why” of this menace. While the Beawar case, the 1992 Ajmer scandal, the love jihad cases in Kerala and those in Uttar Pradesh involved a pattern, organised gang of rape jihadis targeting Hindu girls for sexual abuse and conversion to Islam, OpIndia on a near-daily basis reports cases of grooming jihad from across the country, which may not essentially involve gangs. Besides, the Hinduphobia Tracker offers an extensive database of rape jihad cases alongside other forms of crimes against Hindus.
In the year 2023 alone we reported over 153 cases of love jihad. Gang or no gang, there is a recurring pattern of Muslim men deliberately targeting gullible Hindu and other non-Muslim girls, exploiting their vulnerability to sexually exploit them and coerce them into converting to Islam.
While the Christian missionaries and Pentecostal pastors harvest souls for Christianity by offering financial inducements, giving food grains, and promising to ‘miraculously’ heal diseases, Islamic rape jihadis rely on feigning love, sexual exploitation, coercion and brainwashing to convert their Hindu targets to Islam.
Be it the grooming gang cases in UK’s Rotherham and Telford or those reported in India’s Beawar, Ajmer or Kerala, the striking similarity lies in the modus operandi that transcends geography wherein predators exploit trust through gifts, flattery, or social media, then escalate to sexual abuse and blackmail, and forcing the victims to entrap others, with an additional layer of forced conversion to Islam in the cases in India. Beyond the depravity, this desperation to sexually exploit girls belonging to Hindu and other religions specifically stems from the Islamic disdain for Kafirs.
To the grooming/rape jihadis Hindu and other non-Muslim girls are objects of pleasure, the jihadis see their violation as a conquest of non-Muslims and assertion of Islamic dominance over the infidels. This perverted Jihadist mindset frames sexual exploitation as a tool to humiliate non-Muslims and establish their supposed ‘supremacy’. The horrific cases in Beawar and Ajmer echo this religious chauvinism. Systematic failures coupled with apathy towards victims and misplaced sympathy for perpetrators (as seen in the case of UK grooming gangs), fear of Islamist backlash and political shielding—perpetuate this grooming jihad horror, demanding not just justice for the victims but also a confrontation with its root causes.
