A few days ago, UP anti-terror squad arrested two Muslim preachers who had converted more than one thousand people to Islam in past years. The ringleader, Muhammad Umar Gautam runs an organisation called Islamic Dawah Center from a multi-storey building in Delhi’s Batla House, Jamia Nagar. He had converted to Islam many years ago from Hindu Dharma. HinduPost tried to piece together the journey of Umar Gautam from a regular Hindu student to a Mullah came across some shocking details of the nexus that drives such activities.

Former PM’s nephew?

According to various videos on his Youtube channel, Umar was born in a Hindu Rajput family in Fatehpur. His birth name was Shyam Pratap Singh Gautam. He has claimed to be a nephew of former Prime Minister Vishvanath Pratap Singh on his social media handles of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. He has claimed in a video that he met V P Singh and even gave him “daawat” i.e. invitation to convert to Islam.

Shyam Gautam apparently converted to Islam at the age of twenty, under influence of his college friend Nasir Khan, a neighbour in Nainital, where he was studying for M. Sc. This was in 1984. After that, he was disowned by his family, who apparently did not meet him for twelve years. After his conversion, he went on to study at Jamia Millia Islamia and did M. A. and Ph. D. in Islamic Studies.

After the first day of his conversion, he started his conversion activities.  After his MA from Jamia, he started teaching at Jamia and then Hamdard University while also doing Ph. D. After that, he went to Assam for a long sixteen years. The year was 1994.

For those 16 years, he was associated with Markazul Ma’arif Education & Research Centre at Hojai, Assam. The trust is run by Maulana Badaruddin Ajmal, MP and founder of the Islamist AIDUF party of Assam. Umar Gautam confesses that Ajmal had a huge influence on him in one of his videos.  Sometime during this period, he also succeeded in converting his wife and his mother to Islam. Rest of his family remains Hindu.

So, what exactly was Umar doing in Assam? The website of the Markazul Ma’arif gives a clue. The organisation was started in 1994 for “imparting English and Computer Education to Madrasa Graduates.” Umar was leading the organisation while Ajmal was and continues to be the formal head. One could wonder why teach English to Madarsa graduates. The website again comes to the rescue and tells us that the institute trains those madarsa graduates who have “willingness to master the English language and work for Dawah in the future“. So, basically it trains students to convert non-Muslims(dawah) to Islam. A 2002 article in Milli Gazatte mentions how the centre has no lack of funds, employs excellent teachers with a robust selection system and has students well versed to convert non-Muslims. It also mentions the organisation having centers in Delhi and Mumbai, among other cities.

Conversion activities

In 2010, Umar Gautam left Assam and came back to Jamia Nagar in Delhi. He set up an organisation called Islamic Dawah Center (IDC) and started his conversion factory. However, his association with Badruddin Ajmal was not severed. In the Markazul silver jubilee in 2019, Umar Gautam was one of the Conveners, mentioned below only Badaruddin Ajmal. UP ATS could possibly profit by looking at the source of funding of IDC from northeast and also involve Assam police in its investigations.

IDC mentions on its facebook page that it provides “educational support, financial support, legal support and moral support to more than 400 reverts both male and female.” Reverts, in Islamist terminology, refers to those who have converted to Islam (Islamists consider everyone to be born Muslims, since it is supposedly the only true religion from the one true god. So ‘revert’ implies that one is returning back to the original state of being within the Islamic faith). The Facebook page was last updated in 2015, so the figure of 1000 in 2021 seems quite probable and may infact be an understatement.

Already in 2011, the IDC had started a “Revert Get Together” in Delhi. It featured personal experiences of verious converts to Islam and lectures on why Dawah is necessary for every Muslim, who should use every opportunity to convert others. An article in Ummid.com mentions the proceedings where following people spoke about their conversion:-

• Treshan Singh, a young British citizen who was in Bharat for some Hindi language course from Delhi University.

• One Shikha Sharma, who seems to have been groomed into Islam since she was in Class 10, by a Muslim classmate. Shikha, now Shifa, then converted and was apparently instrumental in conversion of her two younger sisters.

• One Renuka, who studied at Jamia Millia Islamia was groomed to convert to Islam around 1995 and goes by the name of Aisha. She displayed extraordinary zeal and had converted 30 other persons since then till 2010.

• “Firdaus embraced Islam in 1995 and married a much older man, in whom she finds great support.” This should ring a few bells and bring to mind several such cases of grooming seen recently.

• Mufti Mohammad Ahmad did Hifz-e-Quran from some madrasa in Saharanpur and then completed Fazil and Ifta from Darul Uloom Deoband. He was born in a Pandit family.

• Rahul did schooling in science stream from Delhi Public School and obtained B. Tech (Computer) from England in 1998. He too converted to Islam.

• Sulaiman, a Chartered Accountant, was earlier Abhijeet Mahaputra and was from Bhubaneshwar.

• An Assistant professor at a degree college in Ghaziabad, Dr. Shalini converted to Islam when she went to Saudi Arabia for some work.

• Others mentioned in the article are Hafiz Junaid, who was Surender Dubey five years ago; Dr. Mohammad Sami whose previous name was Sunny Vadhwa and is from Panipat; Srinivas, now Mohammad Zubair; Raj Kumar, who was renamed Mohammad Saad; one Dr. Fatimah from Armenia; Dr. Asha, now Aisha; Aliya Fatima and Maryam Fatima whose previous names are not given.

We find reports on the internet of similar get togethers. Take the 2015 report, which mentions that the gathering of “reverts” (naya Mullahs) was attended by Maulana Mohammad Asrarul Haque Qasmi, a Congress MP from Kishanganj (Bihar) who rued that Muslims “have miserably failed to convey the message of peace to the people” i.e. Muslims should convert as many as possible. The report for 2019 meet mentions that more than 60 converts to Islam attended along with many other persons of national and international repute. This also included chairman of Himalaya Drugs, Dr. Syed Farooq from Dehradun among others.

Conversion technique

The conversion technique of Umar Gautam reminds one of fugitive criminal Zakir Naik. Like Naik, Umar’s technique involves a variety of steps before the target is prepared for conversion. No doubt, this is used by all those students of Ajmal’s Madarsa and converts minted by Gautam. Let us check these steps below :-

• To Hindus, Gautam used to tell that they do not follow Vedic religion, which does not believe in murtipuja and sakaar Ishawara. That is of course based on a deficient understanding of Dharma and supposes that an omnipotent God cannot manifest himself in any form He wants to. However, due to lack of religious education among Hindus, this argument is very commonly used by such elements to great effect.

• To reinforce that Islam is compatible with Sanatan Vedic Dharma, he would quote some fake dharmagurus. He often quoted fake Shankaracharya Madhavanand Saraswati, who has often been seen in Islamist and Missionary programmes. Thus, traitors from within Hindu society are utilised to great effect.

• He then used the experience of himself and other converts as an ideal example of how life has changed after accepting Islam. If our readers have attended any meeting of Multi Level Marketing sellers, they would understand the techniques used in this step.

• Next step involves encouraging the targets to read Quran and clear their doubts about the religion by delving into the mythology Islamists have made around Muhammad, their prophet, and Quran.

• The last step is giving the final push by using greed and fear. Unlike the other steps, there is no documentary evidence of this with regards to Umar Gautam, but this is usually how Islamists and missionaries operate. The target is now completely in the awe of the trained intellectual capabilities of the mentor. Now he is told that if he does not accept Islam, he will go to hell forever. If he does accept it, he will live in a kind of super Las Vegas, where women, wine and virility will give them untold pleasures. Women might be offered a lesser, but still lucrative, deal.

All this used to happen in offline centers, classes and even through online spaces like chat forums, social networking sites and the like. After the conversion, IDC used to arrange legal papers and also money for the new converts. As naya Mullahs are more eager to serve their adopted religion, they are now encouraged to bring more converts. Many are sent to study further and improve their skills, others do dawah in their regular life as best as they can.

Influential connections

Apart from connections with Badruddin Ajamal, various Islamic Deobandi NGOs and Dr. Syed of Himalaya Drugs, Umar Gautam has many other influential connections. He is well known in dawah  circles and has been received in many countries all over the world. He has lectured in Aligarh Muslim University on the importance of dawah and more prominently in other countries on the same topic.

According to one of his videos, he has been to England a total of eighteen times. He has been to USA four times and also been to other countries including Saudi Arabia. He has hobnobbed with Islamists in those countries and has participated in programmes of groups like Interpal, which has been declared as a terror group by Israel, US, Canada and Australia due to its close links with terrorist group Hamas.

He has regularly been praised in Saudi media for his conversion, dawah work and been invited as speaker by various Muslim expatriate bodies in Saudi Arabia, for example Aligarh Muslim University Old Boys Association (Jeddah chapter) in Jeddah.

All these activites including monetary help to converts and travel expenses must have cost a significant amount of money that cannot be expected to be generated by Umar Gautam himself. There is no doubt that he is backed by influential Muslim businessmen, industrialists and politicians.

The Islamic danger to Bharat

Curiously, the Delhi police was supposedly oblivious to the activities of Umar. It was Yogi Adityanath’s Ghaziabad Police who got wind of the racket after two Muslims were arrested within the premises of Dasna temple on June 2. Both are suspected to be there to harm Mahant Yati Narsimhanand Saraswati. Both of them had hidden their identity as Muslims and identified themselves as Kashi Gupta and Vipul Vijavargiya.

Security detail of the Mahant found something amiss and it was revealed that Kashi was actually Kashif and Vipul was actually Ramzan. Ramzan was born a Brahmin and converted to Islam by Umar. He was married to sister of Kashif.

The overall Islamist strategy is clear. They are attempting a demographic jihad and have dreams to take over the country by any means necessary. This includes increasing Muslim population by higher TFR, converting Hindus, specially women, and creating exclusive Muslim zones in the country to implement their own rule.

The UP government would do well to investigate the source of funding of the activities of Umar Gautam. This might require cooperation of other states and that of central government, given the extensive network as detailed above. It is quite likely that he is not the only one engaged in such activities.

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