A 17-year-old girl from Palampur, Himachal Pradesh has filed a police complaint against a guy named Muzafar reportedly hailing from Jammu under the POCSO Act accusing him of molestation, sexual abuse, and love jihad.
The complainant Jaya* filed an FIR against the accused on the 12th of November. According to the FIR (to which Hindupost has access), the accused Muzafar had been harassing her for the past 2 years. Following the FIR, Jaya also sent a written request to SP Palampur requesting them to allow her to record a court statement under section 164 of the CrPC.
The letter is written jointly on behalf of Jaya and her father in which the complainants also emphasize that the police are creating psychological pressure on them to take back the FIR. Hindupost has access to the letter and all other relevant documents pertaining to this case which we cannot share publicly because of safety concerns of the girl and her family.
Hindupost gained first-hand information on the case through telephonic interviews with two main sources – Rohit Singh, a Hindu activist from Himachal Pradesh who has been closely involved with the case, and Manthan Sharma, Media (Prachar-Prasar) In-Charge, Vishwa Hindu Pradesh Himachal Pradesh who has been directly involved in the case working closely with victim Jaya and her family.
Based on the information and documentary evidence we received from these sources, we will reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the alleged crime. It’s ultimately up to the authorities to find out the truth and take appropriate action, but this is what we learned in our investigation.
The case first came to public notice through a post shared by Rohit Singh’s X account a couple of days back. In his post, Rohit emphasizes that the investigating officer was reportedly pressurizing the girl and her parents to take the case back by trying to scare them of the possible repercussions the girl would face in society due to the ongoing case. This is something that Rohit emphasized during our conversation as well, that the girl and her family were under unimaginable pressure from their immediate social community to forget whatever happened and move on.
The girl was basically being shamed within the community in the name of honor, and to add to this, the police weren’t very cooperative and sensitive either, he emphasized. Rohit narrated several incidents of police apathy such as one in which the victim Jaya was apparently being taken in a public bus for medical examination by the police officials in full glare of the public when they could have easily opted for a private vehicle.
Manthan Sharma from VHP also emphasized the issue of systemic apathy during our conversation, and most importantly, he said that the police seemed to be not very comfortable with the love jihad angle and that the whole focus of the police was on making it a girl-boy affair went wrong kind of thing. According to both Rohit and Manthan Sharma, the focus of the authorities throughout has been on diluting the love jihad aspect of the case.
How is this case different from your usual jilted lover cases?
And how does the love jihad angle come into play?
To understand all this, let’s deconstruct the entire sequence of events as narrated by our sources, and corroborated through the documentary evidence.
Jaya first came in contact with Muzafar through social media, Instagram to be specific about 2-3 years back. The guy was reportedly hiding his identity as he contacted her through a fake ID pretending to be a Hindu with the surname “Thakur” as a part of his Instagram ID. Jaya somehow got to know soon that the guy was a Muslim. She confronted him and asked about his real identity to which he confessed that he is indeed a Muslim. Jaya then asked Muzafar to not contact her any further and to stay away, since he was faking his identity.
It was reportedly after this that the real harassment began. Muzafar started stalking Jaya through fake IDs on Instagram and Facebook and would call her from multiple random numbers. He also somehow gathered all sorts of information on her immediate community – friends, relatives, etc., through social media and began to build pressure on her to talk to him through various sources.
The guy completely infiltrated her personal network and started sharing her personal information on social media amongst her friends and all – the stuff she must have revealed to him while she was initially chatting with him on social media. This reportedly led to a whole cycle of harassment in which the girl’s immediate community was brainwashed against her. The accused created a counter-narrative in her community that she was the one calling him up and after him, so the usual process of shaming the girl began.
The accused also reportedly threatened the girl to harm her family members if she resisted his advances. All this, according to the sources led Jaya into a whirlpool of depression and she reportedly tried to commit suicide by consuming poison. Following the suicide attempt, her family and schoolteachers got worried, and they registered an FIR at the local police station. But as per Manthan Sharma from VHP, no action was taken on that FIR which rendered the girl further helpless. The exact date of the previous FIR is not known, but according to the sources, it was filed about a year back.
Following all this, the victim Jaya reportedly gave in due to a lack of support from family, society, and authorities. In August 2023, she was reportedly taken to a hotel in McLeodGanj by the accused Muzafar where he sexually exploited and abused her. The details of this incident are there in the FIR and the handwritten statement of the girl.
Following this incident, Jaya reportedly decided to seek help and intervention. According to Manthan Sharma, she got access to VHP’s Himachal Pradesh office through the internet and contacted them.
The accused reportedly contacted the girl again saying he wanted to meet her once more before going to Dubai. He finally came to Himachal Pradesh to meet her on the 10th of November. According to Manthan Sharma, the girl had contacted the VHP by then and took them into confidence regarding this meeting, but they didn’t take the matter too seriously thinking it was a usual boy-and-girl matter. Manthan Sharma emphasized during our conversation that they never presumed the whole thing to be a love Jihad just because the guy was a Muslim. They thought it was a usual ‘things gone wrong between a couple’ sort of a matter, he said.
But then VHP intervened since the girl had contacted them and she also had suicidal tendencies (considering her prior suicide attempt). Manthan Sharma told us that when Muzafar came to meet the girl again on the 10th of November, they took the boy and the girl in a private vehicle and conducted an investigation from their own end. It was at this point that the VHP people reportedly narrated everything to the girl’s father who told them categorically the boy had been harassing the girl and had initially faked his identity, so she had nothing to do with him.
According to Manthan Sharma, it was only when they checked the phone of the accused, that they realized it was a love jihad case. He said they discovered that the guy was running multiple insta and fb IDs in the names of Hindu girls with objectionable material and photos. Also, they reportedly discovered that he was approaching girls in different districts of Himachal Pradesh by forming ids with Hindu names. That’s when the VHP team decided this was a clear case of love jihad and should be investigated from this angle, according to Manthan Sharma.
It was then that the girl filed an FIR on the 12th of November with the help of VHP and other local Hindu organizations, and the accused Muzafar was taken into police custody.
The phenomenon of what is known as love jihad is on an alarming rise in Bharat. Many cases of love Jihad are reported from different parts of Bharat. But the mainstream media mostly either evades coverage of these cases or dilutes the love jihad angle making it to be a usual boy-and-girl affair thing. Despite a steep increase in the number of love jihad cases reported, the mainstream media and the “intellectual” community close their eyes to the phenomenon of love jihad. Instead of examining this phenomenon and connecting the dots to prevent any larger incidents involving breach of national security, they call love jihad a conspiracy theory and dismiss it prime facie.
If you google the term Love Jihad, the first search result that comes up is a Wikipedia entry by the name of “Love jihad conspiracy theory”. This is followed by a slew of international media articles that calls love Jihad a conspiracy against Bharatiya Muslims.
So a highly prejudiced lens is used to examine the phenomenon of love jihad where it’s presumed that it’s focus is on maligning the Muslim community of Bharat. The reality is that many members of the Muslim community could also be victims in the sense they are being used as a part of a toolkit of the larger Jihadi machinery.
During our conversation, Manthan Sharma from VHP emphasized that the accused Muzafar was himself a 19-20-year-old guy and so it was difficult to imagine that he could solely do all this plotting and tapping into the girls’ network and create all these fake IDs without any external help. This reportedly alerted the VHP that there was perhaps a larger racket involved in which many other girls could be trapped. The usual modus operandi of the reported love jihad cases is finding victims through social media, obtaining their confidential information by feigning a love affair, then infiltrating the community, and finally blackmail.
The same pattern is seen in this case; a guy from Jammu contacts a girl from Himachal Pradesh on social media and then goes out of the way to find out all about her, befriend and brainwash her contacts, and make inroads into the local community is not a normal boy-girl story by any stretch of the imagination. By dismissing this prime facie case of love jihad, one is closing their eyes to the outright victimization of Hindu girls.
“VHP is intervening in this case because it’s a love jihad matter. And it’s not a matter of one child, but so many underage boys and girls have been trapped in this. Our educated Hindu society that’s sleeping with open eyes, they are not able to register this simple fact that when this is happening with one Hindu girl, then the same thing can happen to other Hindu girls from her circle. Maybe, those girls haven’t told their families about those incidents. Or maybe, the Hindu organizations or the administration haven’t been able to reach them yet. I am fearful that the lives of many girls are at stake in this case. We want the authorities and intellectuals of society to treat this matter with utmost seriousness”, says Manthan Sharma from VHP.
There is no official data on love jihad cases in Himachal Pradesh. However, according to activists, such cases are being reported frequently from every district of Himachal Pradesh. They emphasize that the police and authorities need to be more sensitive towards the victims and open to the idea of investigating these cases from the point of view of a larger conspiracy of love jihad and not dismiss these as normal jilted lover cases.
“The accused was finally caught when the girl contacted VHP. Such cases have happened in Himachal Pradesh before from what I have heard. There is the Hindu Jagran Manch in HP that works on love jihad cases. And if we go by their version, these girls are used for everything. And those who do not conform, simply disappear”, said Rohit.
Ultimately, it’s all about fairness and justice. The woke lobby talks about justice and fairness all the time but applies these selectively to selective communities. Just because Hindus are a majority in Bharat doesn’t mean they don’t have any right to seek justice. Hindus being a majority community in Bharat doesn’t mean they don’t have a right to get a fair trial if they are being unfairly targeted for being Hindus. The final verdict is always on the courts, and no one is questioning that, but all citizens, Hindus included have a right to a fair and impartial trial.
Jaya comes from a below-the-poverty-line family. Had Jaya been a part of the minority community, all mainstream media would have covered her story, and the case would have gotten adequate projection till now. But Jaya being a Hindu victim, happens to be on the wrong side of the story. With the exception of a highly distorted story in the local edition of Amar Ujala, there hasn’t been any news report about this case.
The Amar Ujala story makes an outrightly mockery of this serious case by calling it one-sided love and the case of a lunatic lover from Jammu landing up in jail. Amar Ujala has made a story without talking to anyone from the side of the victim and made a story that doesn’t name the accused. It’s shocking that the girl has filed a police complaint accusing Muzafar of sexual abuse and molestation and all that Amar Ujala sees is a case of “sirfira aashiq” (crazy lover).
The point of the whole story seems to be diluting the whole love jihad angle, or maybe it’s just a case of hurried and casual reporting. But whatever it is, the media being the fourth pillar of democracy, the least one expects is the media gives some space to the voice of the oppressed and the marginalized, even if they happen to be Hindus.
It would be perhaps apt to end with this quote by Tushar Dogra, Advocate, State Coordinator Bajrang Dal Himachal Pradesh & VHP State Secretary Himachal Pradesh whom we spoke to in a telephonic interview:
“The love Jihad incident that occurred in the Palampur area of Himachal Pradesh is highly condemnable. VHP Himachal and Bajrang Dal register their strong protest against this incident. We also protest the negligence and the casual attitude of the administration in pursuing this case. The government of Himachal Pradesh has formed a government based on the votes of Hindus.
We think that the Himachal government should be sensitive towards issues related to Hindus and take strict actions to prevent the kind of incidents that are happening with people belonging to the majority community of Himachal Pradesh, in collaboration with other local organizations. The government and administration should ensure speedy disposal of cases involving any crime, be it love Jihad or cow smuggling, the victims should get a fair trial, and the accused get stringent punishment”.
*Name has been changed to protect the identity of the victim.
