New Delhi: A court in Lucknow on Wednesday (September 11) sentenced to life 12 persons, including a prominent Islamic scholar from West Uttar Pradesh, and awarded a 10-year jail term to four others after finding them guilty of running an inter-state syndicate for unlawfully converting Hindus to Islam.
This is the first major instance of conviction in a mass conversion case in the state after it introduced a controversial law against unlawful conversion in 2020-21.
The 16 persons are convicted under Sections 3, 5 and 8 of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021 as well as other sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) linked to promoting hatred on religious grounds, outraging religious sentiments and cheating.
Out of the 16, 12 persons received life sentences after being convicted under Section 121A of the IPC linked to waging war against India.
The images of persons convicted under the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021. Photo: Special Arrangement
Among those sentenced to life are prominent Islamic cleric Maulana Kaleem Siddiqui and Maulana Umar Gautam, a Muslim preacher who ran the Islamic Da’wah Centre (IDC) India in Delhi. Gautam was born into a Hindu family in Fatehpur and embraced Islam later in life.
The UP Anti-terrorist Squad (ATS), which had arrested them in the case in 2021, had accused Siddiqui of being the “mastermind” and Gautam of being the “kingpin” of the alleged conversion racket. The two had vehemently denied the charges of forced or unlawful conversions. While pleading for bail in a lower court in 2022, Gautam had said that those persons who had changed their religion to Islam after the legal due process used to come to his institution to read the Kalma.
Gautam and his son Abdullah Umar are also convicted under Section 35 of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010 for allegedly securing large sums of funds from foreign persons and institutions illegally in their non-FCRA accounts. The money was allegedly used for unlawful conversion and for providing financial help to the converts.
Gautam’s organisation IDC India was accused of being used to carry out the mass conversion and receiving foreign funds for the purpose.
Special Judge NIA ATS court Vivekanand Sharan Tripathi, while pronouncing the quantum of punishment, ordered that the victims of unlawful conversion, Aditya Gupta and Mohit Chaudhary, be paid Rs 2 lakh each as compensation under the 2021 Act.
The detailed conviction order is still awaited. According to the allegations levelled by the police against the accused persons they were mass converting Hindus into Muslims through allurements and religious misrepresentation.
The case dates back to June 2021 when the UP ATS arrested Gautam and Mufti Qazi Jahangir Alam Qasmi from New Delhi on charges of allegedly mass converting people to Islam through the allurements and inducements of jobs, money, marriage and mental pressure.
They along with their organisation IDC India are booked for unlawful conversion, cheating, criminal conspiracy, hurting religious sentiments and promoting enmity between religions. The police arrested more people during the course of the investigation and at the end 17 persons were chargesheeted. Legal proceedings against one person, Idris Qureshi, are stayed by the Allahabad high court.
The 17 persons belonged to different states, with seven from Uttar Pradesh (including Siddiqui, Gautam, and Gautam’s son Abdullah Umar), four from Maharashtra, three from Delhi, and one each from Gujarat, Haryana, and Bihar.
The police said that some of the accused persons in the mass conversion case were found to be influenced by the literature of the American extremist Islamic preacher Anwar Al-Awlaki, who was linked to the Islamist militant group Al-Qaeda. On the basis of this, Sections 121A and 123 of the IPC, related to punishment for waging or attempting to wage war or abetting waging of war against the government, and concealing a design to wage war against the government are invoked.
The police had accused Gautam of allegedly converting 1,000 persons to Islam and getting many of them married to Muslims. The ATS on Wednesday said it had recovered documents of religious conversion of 450 persons as well as marriage certificates of such converted people.
Qasmi, an associate of Gautam, was accused of illegally issuing conversion certificates and marriage certificates for the converted persons. Siddiqui, a well-known Islamic cleric who also runs a trust, was accused of using YouTube to spread religious preachings against other faiths and highlighting the virtues of Islam in a bid to inspire people to convert their religion.
The accused persons targetted non-Muslims, especially women, minors, deaf and mute students and those from the weaker sections such as Dalits and tribals, alleged the ATS.
The images of the persons convicted under the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021. Photo: Special Arrangement
The case created a lot of hype with the overlap of mass conversion, foreign funding and extremism-related allegations. Uttar Pradesh police said the mass conversions were taking place to carry out a “demographic change”.
The ATS said that the IDC India was allegedly used as a centre of mass conversion.
IDC was also the examination centre for the International Open University, a private distance education university run by the controversial Islamic preacher of Jamaican origin Bilal Philips, said the ATS.
“The main aim of this syndicate was to carry out a change in the demographics through illegal conversion and implement Sharia law in the country by de-stabilising the elected government,” said the ATS.
The ATS further accused Gautam and others of operating with the principle of “multi-level marketing” to convert a large number of people at a fast pace.
The accused persons would propagate the ills of other religions, especially Hindu, and speak about the virtues of Islam. Through religious misrepresentation, allurements of jobs, marriage and wealth, and the “fear of burning in the fire of hell,” they were converting people to Islam, said the ATS.
The accused persons, now convicted, are also charged with identifying deaf and mute students of the Noida Deaf Society and converting them through allurements and intimidation.
Siddiqui published a monthly magazine Armughan and other literature to propagate his ideas, said the police. The ATS also found as incriminatory a book written by Siddiqui, ‘Aapki Amanat Aapki Seva Mein’ published in 2006 in Muzaffarnagar.
The police also alleged that the accused persons were receiving crores of rupees as funds from abroad and other states in the country through hawala and other sources. Apart from this, they were running several trusts illegally on rotation to receive funds, said the ATS.
Out of the 16 accused, four persons Mohammad Salim, Rahul Bhola, Mannu Yadav alias Abdul Mannan and Kunal Ashok Chaudhary — are sentenced to 10 years in prison after being convicted under Sections 3, 5 and 8 of the UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021 along with sections 120B, 153A , 153B, 295A, 417 and 298 of the IPC.
While Sections 3 and 5 of the unlawful conversion law deal with criminalising religious conversion deemed to have been done through force, misrepresentation, undue influence, coercion, allurement, any fraudulent means or by marriage. Section 8 is related to the charges of not following the prescribed procedure for religious conversion, under which a person desiring to convert has to submit a declaration to the district magistrate sixty days in advance.
The 16 persons convicted in the case received jail terms of 10 years and three years, respectively for offences under Sections 5 and 8 of the anti-conversion law.
The ATS produced 24 witnesses in the court.
Mufti Osama Nadwi, lawyer for Siddiqui and three others, told The Wire that they will challenge the verdict in the Allahabad high court.
Expressing disappointment over the verdict, Nadwi said the FIR and the chargesheet in the case were merely based on far-fetched “presumptions”.
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“They arrested someone on the charge of murder for sowing a seed and then presuming that one day the seed will grow into a tree and the wood from that tree would be used to make an axe that would be later used for murder,” said Nadwi, explaining his point though an illustration.
Nadwi said the court’s order was “full of loopholes” including points such as that the FIR under the unlawful conversion law was not lodged by an aggreived party or a relative, as mandated by the Act.
He also dismissed the charges against Siddiqui that he was propagating Islam and promoting conversion through a YouTube channel. “Maulana Kaleem’s (Maulana Kaleem Siddiqui’s) YouTube channel is still running. Why haven’t they banned it yet,” asked Nadwi.
Lawyer Zia Jilani, who represented some of the other accused, described the court judgment as “perverse”, “illegal” and “unsustainable in the eyes of the law”.
He told The Wire that the entire proceedings were based on an FIR that was lodged by an incompetent person.
“The investigating officer of the ATS lodged the FIR even though the law states that only an aggreived person or a relative can lodge a complaint under the unlawful conversion law,” said Jilani, adding that the court neglected this aspect.
“How come the case is tenable under law,” asked the lawyer, who plans to challenge the verdict in the high court.
Jilani also pointed out that none of the 24 witnesses produced by the Uttar Pradesh ATS testified to being forcibly converted. In fact, many of them had converted long before the law was enacted, he added.
Jilani, who represented Rahul Bhola and Mannu Yadav, both mute and deaf, said that the investigating officer produced only a single witness against them, and that too on the premise that they made conversion certificates for the person.
Najmus Saquib Khan, another lawyer representing the accused, argued that despite the police allegations of an attempt to alter the demography through funding, the ATS could only produce eight independent witnesses, out of a total of 24 witnesses presented in the court.
Moreover, out of the eight, only six were directly related to conversion allegations. Khan said that many of these conversions were carried out much before the 2021 law came into force. He also found it odd that while the ATS produced only eight independent witnesses, the number of people accused in the case was 17, raising questions about the agency’s initial claims that around 1,000 persons — later toned down to a figure of 450 — had been illegally converted.
“Where are these 450 persons and why were their statements not recorded?” Khan asked.
The arrest of Gautam and Siddiqui had invited plenty of criticism against the Uttar Pradesh police which was accused of carrying out a witch-hunt against Muslim preachers under the garb of the new law.
With the NIA/ATS court in Lucknow convicting 16 persons, the state police said it felt vindicated after many people had expressed doubts about their allegations.
“What’s notable is that following the arrest of the kingpin and mastermind in the case, some religious fundamentalists had on social media and other mediums had dubbed it as politically motivated and criticised it,” said the ATS in a statement.
Uttar Pradesh director general of police Prashant Kumar went a step further and described the verdict as a “landmark” case proving that the police action was based on facts and evidence.
“This decision will send a good message in the society that those involved in the activities of unlawful religious conversion…that their goal was exposed. This will also bring awareness among people that they should not get involved in such wrong things,” said Kumar.
