A schoolgirl committed suicide at her home in Ghaziabad district of Uttar Pradesh on Monday (19 December) after her former boyfriend-turned-stalker uploaded their intimate visuals on social media. 

The girl was Hindu while the stalker is Muslim. The incident comes at a time when there is nationwide anger against a spate of cases where Hindu women have been targeted by men from the Muslim community for religious conversion or sexual exploitation through relationships. 

In many cases, the women have been killed for showing resistance or committed suicide after humiliation.

In the Ghaziabad case, a man named Mohammed Irfan formed relationship with a schoolgirl named Kiran Yadav, who lived in his colony. He recorded intimate visuals of them. 

After they had a fallout, he circulated the visuals on social media as a means of blackmailing her into submission again. 

The victim hanged herself from a ceiling fan around 6pm on 19 December at her house in Khoda locality. Nobody was home at that time.

Her father Raju Yadav gave a complaint to the Khoda police station of Ghaziabad, identifying Irfan and his father Abdul Rahim as accused. 

Based on Yadav’s complaint, a first information report (FIR) was registered under IPC sections 306 (abetment of suicide), 504 (intentionally insulting), 506 (criminal intimidation), 120-B (criminal conspiracy) and section 67 of the Information Technology Act, 2008 the next day (FIR number 719/2022).

In his complaint, Yadav said that after Irfan circulated the visuals, he went to his house to confront the family. However, Irfan and his father Abdul Rahim abused him and kicked him out of their house. 

Yadav told Swarajya over the phone that Kiran studied in Class 12 at a government school in New Delhi, which is two-three kilometres from his house. He would drop her to her school daily in the morning, and she would return on her own in an autorickshaw. 

Yadav says that though Irfan would visit his family, he had no inkling that his daughter talked to him without his knowledge. He says that he learnt about the visuals on Saturday (17 December). 

Abdul Rahim works as an auto-driver while Irfan, who is about 22-23, does odd-jobs, said Yadav.

Asked if he would have approved of his daughter’s relationship with a man from the Muslim community if the family was higher in financial and social status, Yadav flatly denied it, saying such a match in any circumstance would have been unacceptable to him.

Kiran is survived by her parents and a younger sister. Yadav is a native of Gonda district and lived in Ghaziabad on rent.

He said that when he went to the police on Saturday to report about the visuals, the Khoda police told him that he should go to Delhi instead, as the girl studied in Delhi.

“They did not note down anything in their diary. Instead, they asked me to catch the accused and bring him to the police station,” Yadav told Swarajya.

Yesterday, the Ghaziabad police posted a video statement by ACP Indirapuram on their official Twitter account. The officer said the Khoda police received information about the suicide at 9pm the same day. They took the body in their custody and are investigating the matter. 

In recent years, public anger has been rising against cases of this pattern, which is commonly called ‘love jihad’, a term that was coined by Christian organisations in Kerala more than a decade ago. 

Lately, this term has been used by Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Buddhist and tribal communities in street protests against the pattern.

A recent case that particularly triggered outrage is that of Shraddha-Aaftab case. Aaftab Ameen Poonawalla entered into a relationship with Shraddha, but made her elope with him after her parents disapproved of the relationship on account of Aaftab being Muslim. The couple shifted from Maharashtra to Delhi. Within a month, Aaftab killed her. 

Much to everyone’s shock, police revealed that Aaftab chopped Shraddha’s body into 35 pieces using a meat cleaver, packed them into small packets and stored them in a large refrigerator he bought especially for the purpose. Over the next 16 days, he disposed of all the parts by throwing them in the jungle.

The murder came to light six months after Shraddha went missing when her father, who had lost contact with her, started searching for her. (Read Swarajya’s report on the case here.)

In a similar case, a Dalit woman named Rabita Pahadin was killed by her husband Dildar Ansari and his family in Jharkhand last week, after their marriage caused dispute in the family as Dildar was already married and had children. 

In an eerie similarity to Shraddha’s case, Rabita’s body was chopped using an electric iron cutter and packed into plastic bags for disposing of, before locals alerted the police about it. (Read Swarajya’s report on the case here.)

This week, a protest with estimated participation of 50,000 people was carried out in Maharashtra’s Dhule district to demand the state to bring about a law to curb ‘love jihad’. Two local cases triggered this protest. 

In the first case, a 24-year-old Hindu woman filed a case against her Muslim husband and his father for marrying her through fraud, and rape.

In the second case, a 14-year-old minor girl from the tribal Bhil community in Malegaon town of Nashik district was allegedly abducted by a man named Mohammed Imran Sheikh with the intention of nikah through her conversion. The girl went missing on the day of Diwali and was recovered by the police 15 days later.

Two weeks ago, a woman named Neelam Devi was brutally hacked to death by stalker Shakeel Miyan after Neelam’s husband asked him to stay away from his wife.