A Muslim man in Uttar Pradesh’s Moradabad district was arrested along with his younger brother after he tried to register his marriage with a 22-year-old Hindu girl, ANI reported.
They were booked under the newly approved Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2020, which sets to target cases of “love jihad” in the garb of criminalising religious conversions for the purpose of marriage.
The woman said that they had been consensually married to each other for five months.
“I got married willingly. I am an adult, aged 22,” The Hindu reported the woman as saying.
But when they were at at the marriage registration office in Kanth, they were handed over to the police by members of a right-wing outfit. In a clip that has gone viral, member of Bajrang Dal are seen to be surrounding the woman asking for the permission from the District Magistrate for converting.
“When I arrived with my workers, they (the couple) had left the tehsil premises. We chased them and caught hold of them them near a Ravidas temple," The Hindu quoted Bajrang Dal leader Rakesh Kumar as saying. The men claimed that the woman’s family members had alerted them.
An FIR was lodged on the complaint of the woman’s mother under Sections 3 and 5 of the new ordinance against unlawful conversion.
This is the fifth case to be filed under the new Ordinance since it got approved in Uttar Pradesh on 26 November. Currently a plea has been filed in the Supreme Court to challenging the ordinance as it goes against the fundamental rights of citizens.
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