Bareilly: Three days subsequent to filing the first case under the recently promulgated anti-conversion law, the Bareilly police department have made the first arrest in the case.
Uwaish Ahmad, 22, was booked on Sunday, hours following the ordinance against “forced” religious conversion became imposed.
Ahmad was booked under the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2020, for “threatening to abduct” and convert a 20-year-old married woman in Deorania area of the Bareilly region.
The accused had gone into hiding since. He said that he feared being shot in an encounter.
Additional Superintendent of Police (Rural) Sansaar Singh stated: “He might be under this impression, but police never intended to do any such thing as he is not a history-sheeter.”
Sansaar Singh said that they were only searching for him and several teams were deployed in neighbouring districts as well.
Ahmad and the woman were friends from school. The woman’s family had filed a case against him in the past year additionally when she had gone missing. Afterwards, it turned out that she had left the home at the instance of the youth. They later declared they wanted to live together.
She was “recovered” from Bhopal while they were headed to Mumbai.
A couple of months later, she was married to another man. However, Ahmad began stalking the woman, the complainant claimed.
The woman’s father, in his complaint, had claimed that Ahmad had been threatening and stalking her for as far back as three years.
Ahmad has been booked under Section 3/5 of the ordinance, alongside sections 504 (breach of peace) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the IPC.
Ahmad said to reporters: “I have been arrested under the love jihad law. I have no link with the woman, she got married a year back. I am innocent.”
Uttar Pradesh became the first state in November to pass a law against “forced” religious conversions.
Some people have described it as offensive and regressive, with many worried that such laws will prompt harassment and misuse since “love jihad” has always been viewed as a term utilized by fringe right-wing radical Hindu groups. It is not a term that is formally recognised by Indian law.
