Months after a love jihad law had been passed in Uttar Pradesh, horrifying cases of the practice keep coming to light.
A woman in Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh, has approached the police claiming that one Imran Hashmi pretended to be Sonu Shukla to strike up a relationship with her, ABP reports. When she refused to marry him, he raped her and released her explicit video. The police said they are investigating the case.
The woman, who used to sing in a Jagran, met a man who introduced himself as Sonu Shukla. The duo became close, and Sonu Shukla then started pressuring her to get married. When the woman said she wanted to meet his family, he took her to his house, where the woman realized that he was Muslim. The woman alleges that at this point, the man spiked her food with a drug, and raped her while she was unconscious. He also made a video of the act, and threatened to release it.
The man then revealed his name was Imran Hashmi, and started pressuring her to convert to Islam and marry him. The woman refused, and her marriage was later fixed with another man. At this point, Imran Hashmi sent her explicit videos to her to-be groom, who broke the marriage.
This is a pattern that’s common to hundreds of love jihad cases which have been reported from Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere. In spite of a law which now stipulates 10 years of jailtime for those to mislead women by hiding their religion, cases of the practice continue to stream in with alarming regularity.
