A shocking case of sexual exploitation of multiple girls via love/grooming jihad has come to light from Sonbhadra, UP.
The accused Zeeshan was arrested for abducting a minor Hindu girl and forcing her to ‘marry’ him, after the girl’s parents lodged a police complaint. The minor has been recovered and her statement recorded. It has emerged that Zeeshan threatened to kill her and her family.
As per Sonbhadra ASP Vinod Kumar, phone numbers of 13 Hindu girls along with their objectionable photos and videos have been recovered from Zeeshan’s phone. A resident of Millat Nagar in Sonbhadra, Zeeshan used to lure Hindu girls into relationships and then sexually exploit them under promise of marriage. Police investigation has revealed that even his mother and father were involved in abetting these crimes.
Two years back, another shocking case had been reported from Sonbhadra when Priya Soni was raped and beheaded by her Muslim ‘husband’ and his friend for refusing to convert to Islam.
Religious sanction for Love/Grooming Jihad
Dehumanization of Hindus as kafirs (non-believers, idol-worshippers) and the belief that Hindu girls are easy targets is a widespread problem within Muslim society, something that our Hinduphobic elites prefer to ignore. Case after case has shown how Hindu and other non-Muslim girls and women are targeted especially for their religion – see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.
By now, multiple Muslim clerics have been found to be involved in exhorting Muslim youth to target non-Muslim girls. Last year, a teacher in a mosque in Fatehpur was exposed by an elderly member of the same mosque committee itself. Abdul Majeed Khan said that Hafiz Firoze Alam taught Muslim youth to trap girls of other religions for sexual exploitation, conversion and marriage. A woman Islamic scholar from the renowned Al-Azhar university at Cairo, Egypt said “Muslim men can rape non-Muslim women to humiliate them”.
Maulana Kaleem Siddiqui, arrested for running a large foreign-funded conversion racket, was heard saying that ‘upper caste’ Hindu girls should be the preferred target for conversion. Siddiqui’s trust funds several madrassas in UP and he has been a member of the Sharia Advisory Council of Zakat Foundation of India, an NGO famed for coaching Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) aspirants and rehabilitating Rohingyas in Bharat.
Social sanction for targeting non-Muslim females
While the 1992 Ajmer serial gang-rapes and blackmail ring shows us that objectification of Hindu girls by Islamists is not new, such attitudes have grown manifold in the digital age. One just has to look at the explosion of social networking groups and hashtags like #HSlut4MStud that fetishize and sexually objectify Hindu girls and even e-books about rape fantasies involving Hindu women being churned out wholesale on Kindle.
In Muslim societies like Pakistan, social activists have observed that forced conversions enjoy social sanction. It is a mainstream belief that any non-Muslim being converted to Islam should be ‘grateful’ as they have been ‘saved from the fires of jahannum’ (Islam says that non-believers will burn in hell in the afterlife, irrespective of however many good deeds they have done in their life). So reports of rape and forced conversion of non-Muslim girls are either silently cheered, ignored or labelled conspiracies to ‘defame Islam’.
The situation is no different in Bharat than the rest of the subcontinent. Indeed, Bharat is home to some of the most fundamentalist and fanatical Islamic organizations/movements the world has ever seen like Tablighi Jamaat, Deoband, Barelvis, Jamaat-e-Islami etc.
Indian ex-Muslims have also spoken at great length about how tactics like Love Jihad have wide acceptance in Muslim society, even among the educated classes, as it is seen as serving the cause of Islam and ‘removing jahiliya (ignorance)’. The indoctrination of Muslim children to regard the non-Muslim as inferior starts at an early age, and boys looking for ‘some fun’ easily find support and training on how to trap non-Muslim girls, especially minors who can be more easily influenced and intimidated.
Conclusion
This case from Sonbhadra will be ignored or suppressed by mainstream English-language media and digital outlets like Scroll, The Wire, Newslaundry etc., just like they do with the other everyday cases of rape and love/grooming jihad. They will continue dismissing Love Jihad as a “conspiracy theory espoused by Hindutva supremacists”. But if a Muslim claims that he was assaulted and made to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’, that will be splashed all over and used to shame Hindus.
Such is the dismissive attitude of our media towards such crimes and the lack of interest in covering them, that we haven’t been able to find any image of the accused Zeeshan.
People like Zeeshan and his parents feel no moral pinpricks when they cold-bloodedly target Hindu girls. Unless we uproot the socio-religious institutions that are producing such mindsets, and the intellectual elites who whitewash their crimes, ordinary Hindu girls and their families will continue suffering. Our broken law enforcement and judicial system has miserably failed to act as a deterrent.
A Zeeshan managed to get away for so long, even after exploiting and harassing 13 girls, because many Bharatiyas no longer trust our system and avoid police and courts as much as possible. They prefer to cut their losses and move on. Even though he has been arrested in this case, the odds are high that Zeeshan will escape any serious punishment. Unless such criminals are given the death penalty or at least life imprisonment, there is no real deterrence. However, our SC appears more interested in ‘reforming sinners‘ than delivering justice to victims.
A complete reboot of our State and its institutions, i.e. the foundation of a second Republic built around a Dharmic Constitution, is the only lasting solution.