A court in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly has sentenced a 25-year-old man to life imprisonment and his father to a two-year term after finding them guilty of coercing a 20-year-old woman to embrace Islam and marrying her while adopting a Hindu identity, The Indian Express reported.
The verdict comes despite the woman rescinding her testimony, reported The Times of India. On September 19, the woman stated that her previous testimony had been false, due to right-wing groups who had put pressure on her parents.
The court dismissed her change in statement, attributing it to undue influence from the accused.
Judge Ravi Kumar Diwakar in the Fast-track court observed that the man was guilty of “love jihad”, which he said was being carried out with the malicious intent of weakening the country “in the pattern of such cases in Bangladesh and Pakistan”. Judge Diwakar was also known for allowing a survey of the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi in 2022.
Love jihad is an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory flared up in India by Hindutva groups accusing an organised attempt by Muslim men to coerce Hindu women into falling in love with them in a plot to convert them to Islam. The accusations, investigated by the National Investigation Agency among other law enforcement agencies in the last decade have cleared such allegations in multiple cases.
“The process of ‘love jihad’ involves significant financial resources, and in this case, it is likely that foreign funding is involved,” the order reads, according to Hindustan Times.
“The primary aim of ‘love jihad’ is to alter demographics and stir international tensions, driven by radical factions within a religious group. Essentially, it refers to the deceptive conversion of non-Muslim women to Islam through fraudulent marriages, ” the judge said during the hearing.
This is the first verdict since the state government introduced new stringent provisions in 2024 to the Uttar Pradesh Unlawful Conversion of Religion (Amendment) Act.
But the FIR is from May 2023 at the Devarnia police station in Bareilly.
The judge has not pronounced the accused guilty under the new law but sent copies of his verdict to the state police chief, chief secretary and the Bareilly senior superintendent of police with directives to book them as per new provisions.
According to The Indian Express report, the case is based on a complaint lodged by the woman accusing Mohammed Aalim Ahmed, his father Sabir Alam and six other family members of putting pressure on her to convert and also of forcing her to abort a foetus after the marriage.
