No rise in ‘love jihad’, finds UP Police; contradicts CM Yogi Adityanath’s claims

Lucknow, Nov 24: A ‘special investigation’ launched by UP Police into allegations of allurement and forced conversion of Hindu women – which is termed as ‘love jihad’ by UP CM Yogi Adityanath – has concluded that the majority of Hindu-Muslim romance cases probed were consensual, a report carried by The Wire says.

All 22 police stations in Kanpur city were asked to report suspicious instances of Hindu-Muslim romance but only 14 cases eventually emerged, which the special investigation team probed. The SIT’s report concludes that in eight of the 14 cases, the Hindu women had either married Muslim men or been with them of their own free will. In six cases, the FIRs registered are still being investigated, though in one of those cases the accused Muslim man has been released on bail.

Kanpur Police SIT probed 14 cases in September in which Muslim men allegedly married Hindu women and forcibly converted them or had developed ‘love relations’ by deception.

In eight of the 14 cases probed, the women openly declared that their relationships with the accused were consensual and based on love. Six of these involve marriages with Muslim men, while two were confined to what the police report calls “love relations”.

One of these two women apparently told the police that she had ‘love relations’ with a Muslim man but that was because the man had promised to marry her.

In the six cases where a nikah took place, the police treated the husbands as accused but was unable to produce evidence that the women were converted forcibly.

One of the women was quoted as saying there was a love affair between her and the accused, whom she knew for a long time. Another woman told the police that she had consensually gone with the accused, made physical contacts and decided to marry him of her own free will. A third woman said that there was no pressure on her to marry the accused and she had gone to him on her own. Another woman said that she had had a nikah with the accused of her free will.

The report notes that three of the women clearly added that the allegations mentioned are false.

Of the 14 cases probed, only six have been identified by the police as ‘suspicious’. The SIT report says that the said women have “validated” the claims made by the complainants of the FIR, who are, in most cases, either the brother or father of the woman. Of these, one involves an accusation of rape, two are of marriage where the man used a false name, one is an alleged kidnapping, one is of intimidation and one of a boy romancing a girl on the telephone using a fake name.