A 6-month-old missing person case turned out to be the depressingly familiar story of an Islamist groomer murdering a Hindu girl.

Shraddha was working in a call center in Mumbai and met a man named Aftab Poonawalla through a dating app. The two started a live-in relationship in Mumbai, which her family opposed. So they shifted to Delhi and started living in the Chhatarpur area.

Her estranged family continued to follow her on social media, but when she stopped posting updates, her worried father lodged a missing person complaint in May. He suspected her partner Aftab had a hand in her disappearance.

Using technical surveillance and intelligence sources, police managed to trace Aftab. During questioning, he confessed that he had murdered Shraddha as she was putting pressure on him to get married. After strangling her, he chopped her body into 35 pieces, bought a large fridge and stored her body parts in that.

For 18 nights, he wrapped those parts in black plastic and went out to dispose of them one by one at 2 AM in the night in the nearby jungle area.

Addl DCP-I, South dist, Delhi, Ankit Chauhan told ANI:

“A man & a woman had come here from Mumbai. A few days after they started staying here, the woman’s father in Mumbai realised she was missing. He filed a missing report with Mumbai Police. Her last location was found to be Delhi.

“They came to Mehrauli PS & we immediately initiated legal action. They had pvt jobs in Mumbai & the man had started working here. He has been identified as Aftab Poonawalla. They got together via dating app, were in a live-in relationship in Mumbai & continued here

“They quarreled frequently & it used to get out of control. In this particular instance, the man lost his temper & killed her in May’22. He told us that he chopped her into pieces & disposed of her parts in nearby areas. He has been arrested, investigation going on.”

Apathy, ignorance, lack of Dharmic grounding aka sanskars

The disease of hook-up culture and live-in relations is spreading fast in metros and slowly seeping even into tier two towns due to blind adulation of American pop culture and trashy web series and movies. Urduwood aka Bollywood films and OTT web series have accelerated uptake of this neo-colonial ‘global culture’ and given it an Indian packaging. Even single parenthood is now being glorified, despite the mountain of evidence on how this breakdown of family has adversely affected Western society. Filmy icons like Jaya Bacchan are adding ghee to the fire with their unhinged takes.

Many Hindu families in cities are now mostly functioning as nuclear families, if that, and are largely cut off from close relatives and extended family ties. These parents have a cursory knowledge of Dharma, and their religious community life has broken down – even temple visits consist of a hurried personal darshan of the deity, without attending discourses or structured interaction/sewa activities with other devotees and their families. Many traditional Dharmic organizations have also abandoned such Hindus and are hardly doing any outreach, not least because the secular state has weakened Hindu organizations through incessant legal attacks and demonization.

As a result, most Hindus youth, both boys and girls, are drifting along in a sea of degeneracy without any Dharmic anchor or sanskars (good values) to help them discriminate between right and wrong. Anyone who talks about Dharma is shouted down or mocked with slurs like ‘dehati’ (rustic), ‘sanskari balak’ (the word has taken overtones of being pedantic, sheltered and diffident) etc.

Moreover, Hindu youth, fed on a diet of Urduwood ‘love conquers all’ romance movies, are completely unaware of the basics of Islam and sharia. They do not know that Islamic law explicitly forbids the marriage of a Muslim with a Hindu, unless the Hindu converts to Islam. Moreover, most Muslim youth are indoctrinated since birth to regard Hindus as ‘inferior, immoral’ beings. This stereotyping makes many Muslim youth regard Hindu girls as objects for pleasure and fooling around, but not ‘pure’ or ‘worthy’ for marriage.

Even if the Muslim male agrees for marriage, he will almost always demand the girl convert to Islam, manipulating her using whatever means he can.

Let’s assume the girl decides to convert for ‘love’, maybe convincing herself that it is just a formality and she will continue to worship Hindu deities in private as a Urduwood fantasy film showed ‘broad-minded’ Mughal king Akbar allowing his Hindu wife Jodha Bai to do. She is soon in for a rude shock.

She realizes that Abrahamic religions like Islam are not like other Dharmic panths/sampradayas (community/sect) which have respect/tolerance for each other’s traditions even despite theological differences. Once the honeymoon period ends, she is told to abandon her old ‘kafir’ ways and behave like a ‘good Muslim’. If she resists, her husband and in-laws make her life hell, and she runs a very real risk of being sexually assaulted by other men of the family or by a maulvi in name of ‘purifying her’ or doing halala, or of being abandoned or murdered.

A Hindu girl is also by & large clueless about Muslim personal law, and how she has very little rights if she converts to Islam and has a nikah. Most are not aware of the Special Marriage Act which allows them to retain their religious identity and safeguards their rights in case of divorce, or how even ‘enlightened, modern’ Muslims like Aamir Khan allegedly declared that his children from Hindu wives will follow Islam only.

Conclusion

There is an awakening taking place among Hindus, and the anti-conversion law introduced in UP which was later copied by a few other states is a welcome step. But the onus of instilling Dharmic values in our children, and educating them about the real dangers that lurk in society, finally rests upon Hindu parents and Hindu religious-social organizations. We need to up our game and become ambassadors for Dharma in a structured and bold way, else we will continue seeing more Shraddhas in body bags.

Update / postscript

Nov 14, 5.30 PM: Some social media posts of Aftab Poonawalla have come to light which purportedly show a woke side to him. This should act as a warning to all that, just as we saw during the #MeToo movement, many predators often take ultra-liberal public positions to endear themselves to potential targets.

Notions of a ‘brave new world without boundaries or consequences’ are planted in impressionable minds, so that the very act of sexual exploitation can be passed off as some sort of liberation.

The most potent antidote to such toxic ideologies and ‘-isms’ is Dharma, especially realizing one’s svadharma and then following that path to the best of our ability.

Nov 14, 8:40 PM: Aftab’s full name is Aftab Amin Poonawala, and Shraddha’s is Shraddha Vikas Walkar. As per reports, Shraddha belonged to the OBC/SC-ST Koli community while Aftab worked as a chef (he was initially working in the same call center as Shraddha).

One of her friend’s Laxman Nadar has come forward to state that Shraddha had feared for her life after a fight with Aftab in the past too, but when he and other friends wanted to lodge a police complaint Shraddha stopped them. When Shraddha stopped answering texts or receiving his calls, it was this friend who informed her family.

Times Now accessed a copy of the FIR lodged by Shraddha’s father, which states –

“After around 8-9 months we came to know that my girl Shraddha Vikas Walkar and Aaftab Amin are in a relationship. My girl had told my wife in the year 2019 that she wants to stay in a live-in relationship with Aaftab Amin Poonawala for which I and my wife had forbidden her because I am a Hindu and that boy is a Muslim. We don’t support inter-religion/inter-caste marriage here.

“On our refusal, my daughter left the home and went to stay in a live-in relationship with Aaftab Amin Poonawala. After a few months, my girl Shraddha Vikas Walikar tells her mother that Aaftab Amin Poonawala quarrels and beats her up. Shraddha spoke to me on the phone a couple of days after my wife’s death and she also told me that Aaftab used to beat her.

“I did not talk to my girl for many months for not listening to me. On September 14, my son Shreejay Vikas Walkar called by my girl’s friend Laxman Nadar who informed me that his sister Shraddha’s phone has been switched off for the last two months. I got the mobile number of Laxman Nadar from my son who spoke with me. He told me the same thing that he used to talk to my girl but for the last two-two and a half months he has not talked to my girl. My girl was unavailable on phone for around two months, so I lodged a missing report in the Manikpur police station in Maharashtra.”

Shraddha’s parents had separated few years back, and she was living with her mother and brother. Her mother passed away in Jan 2020.