A 21-year-old Muslim man has been arrested for allegedly assaulting his live-in partner, a Dalit woman, and forcing her to convert to Islam in Tamil Nadu’s Tirupur district, police said on Thursday.
According to the police, the accused befriended the 21-year-old woman on Instagram, and the couple started living together since last year.
Based on her complaint, a first information report (FIR) was registered at the Nallur police station in Tirupur on May 5, said a senior police officer. The woman in her complaint has alleged that the accused had clicked her naked photos and pressured her to wear a burqa and a hijab, police said.
The accused would force himself on her, beat her after getting drunk and use casteist slurs against her, a senior police officer said, quoting from the FIR. “Fearing for my life, I went back to my home town (in Karur district) around Diwali in 2021,” the woman said in her complaint.
A month later, she went back to Tirupur to collect her Aadhaar Card and education certificates from him, for which she asked him to meet her at a public place. But the accused refused to give her the documents, the woman has claimed in her complaint. “The accused shared the woman’s naked photos on WhatsApp with her friends and relatives and uploaded some of them on Instagram as she refused to convert her religion,” stated the FIR, a copy of which HT has seen.
{{/usCountry}}A month later, she went back to Tirupur to collect her Aadhaar Card and education certificates from him, for which she asked him to meet her at a public place. But the accused refused to give her the documents, the woman has claimed in her complaint. “The accused shared the woman’s naked photos on WhatsApp with her friends and relatives and uploaded some of them on Instagram as she refused to convert her religion,” stated the FIR, a copy of which HT has seen.
{{/usCountry}}On January 14 this year, he called and threatened to leak more photos and videos on social media. “He has been calling my parents and relatives and threatening to kill me,” she claimed in her complaint.
The accused has been booked under sections 354 A (assault) and 506(I) (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and relevant sections of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and the Information Technology Act, police said.
“He was arrested on May 11 and sent to judicial custody,” said a police officer, requesting anonymity.
This is the third case of alleged conversion bid in Tamil Nadu with the previous two complaints involving school children were brought to the fore by some right-wing organisations and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been demanding to bring back a law against forceful religious conversion in the state.
In March, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) claimed that there was evidence of religious conversion attempt in the suicide of a 17-year-old girl, studying at a Christian residential school in Thanjavur district. The BJP had also made similar allegations in the case, which is being investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
In April, a government school teacher was suspended in Kanyakumari district for allegedly glorifying Christianity and making controversial remarks against Hindus after a purported video of a Class 6 student making the accusation had gone viral.
On Thursday, the Karnataka cabinet approved a proposal to bring an anti-conversion ordinance. In 2002, the AIADMK government led by former chief minister J Jayalalithaa introduced the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Forcible Conversion of Religion Act, which she later repealed.