On October 11, the chairman of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights shot off a fiery letter to the chief secretary of Maharashtra.
Priyank Kanoongo claimed minor Hindu girls in a village in Ahmednagar were being “trapped, lured and abused for the purpose of religious conversions”. This was purportedly run under the guise of a “tuition class” where Hindu students were targeted.
He claimed the police “have not paid any attention” to these developments and urged the chief secretary to move out the district’s top cops so that the CBI could take over the investigation.
Kanoongo also said the NCPCR had documented this “grooming ring” during a fact-finding mission in August.
Newslaundry has a copy of the letter and a copy of the fact-finding mission’s report. The names of all the accused and the locations have been changed since these involve cases filed under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.
At the heart of these accusations are two people: Imran* and Meher*.
Meher, 33, is a tuition teacher in the Ahmednagar village. She’s been in jail since August. She’s booked under POCSO for allegedly “luring” minor Hindu girls.
According to Kanoongo’s fact-finding report, Meher ran an “organised racket of religious conversion on the pretext of imparting tuitions to minor girls”. She purportedly forced them to embrace Islam, and even fed them “milk and rice mixed with some kind of powder which she would reportedly claim having the strength of Islam”.
Imran, 20, is a construction worker from the village. He works in a different city and, like Meher, is currently in jail. Kanoongo’s report has a series of allegations – for instance that Imran “verbally and physically abused” a minor Hindu girl, “sexually abused”and “blackmailed” her, and urged the minor to “elope and marry him as per Islamic customs”.
Kanoongo claimed the police conducted a “laxed, improper and misguided investigation”.
Newslaundry investigated these allegations. The investigation is ongoing, and so nothing can be said about Meher and Imran’s culpability or innocence, but we found other facts that are important to the case.
They include Imran being assaulted, the alleged storming of a mosque, and a parade of FIRs.
The sequence of events
The case took place in a small village in Ahmednagar where Muslims are a minority; there are about 120 Muslims living there in total.
Newslaundry pieced together the chronology of events through statements given to the police and FIRs filed in the matter.
The basic accusation is that Meher ran a tuition class that she used for “religious conversion” and “encouraging” minor Hindu girls to fraternise with Muslim boys. Imran is accused of visiting the tuition class to allegedly stalk and harass these minor Hindu girls. Imran’s minor sister and others – Javed*, Ahmad*, Irfan*, Mohsin*, Zameer* and Sahir* – allegedly aided and abetted Imran.
Here are the facts of the case.
Imran was allegedly friendly with a minor Hindu girl named Tanvi*. Aged 13, she was friends with Imran’s 16-year-old sister and she lived next door to his family in the village.
On July 26 this year, Imran was in the village visiting his family. He was heading to the local mosque at around 11 am with his friend Mohsin, also originally from the village and now working with Imran in the city.
While they were walking to the mosque, Imran and Mohsin were allegedly “stopped by around 12-13 people”. According to Imran’s police statement, they accused Imran of “luring girls into a trap”.
Newslaundry learned that these were local Hindu men who were allegedly unhappy with Imran’s friendship with Tanvi and a selfie he had taken with her and his sister.
“They started beating me, snatched away my mobile...and assaulted me with a spade and sticks,” Imran said in a police statement recorded later. “They dragged me near the mosque and assaulted me again.” Mohsin was also “assaulted”.
Imran’s brother and others were nearby and came running. The attackers “fled” and Imran and Mohsin were taken to a hospital. Mohsin had minor injuries but Imran had fractured his hand. Newslaundry has a copy of Imran’s medical report which indicated he had a fracture on his left forearm, bruising on his back, and blurred vision in his right eye.
Locals told Newslaundry that the police arrived at the spot after Imran’s assault but no FIR was filed because “elders intervened” and told the police the matter was resolved.
But the uneasy calm did not last.
The FIR over Imran’s assault
On July 27, Imran was shifted to another hospital for treatment. Before he was moved, cops from the local police station arrived to take his police statement.
The police told Newslaundry they had received “information” that the assault had taken place. This will be explained later in the story.
In his statement, Imran named nine people as being part of the group that allegedly assaulted him. The police then registered an FIR based on Imran’s statement against nine identified assaulters.
But something else had happened previously in the village.
On the evening of July 26, a group of “about 50” people gathered in front of the mosque. The group included five or six men who had allegedly assaulted Imran.
Cops from the same police station arrived and arrested 14 people. Based on a complaint from one Javed, they registered an FIR at about 3 am on July 27.
According to the FIR, the mob “vandalised” the mosque, “destroyed shops belonging to Muslims”, and “hurled religious abuses”. An “armed mob with iron rods and sticks” then allegedly tried to break into Javed’s house nearby.
Javed’s sister-in-law is Meher. The FIR quoted Javed as saying: “They hurled abuses and said they will not let Muslims live in the village. They threatened to kill if anybody approached the police.”
The FIR said some Muslims “fled the village” in fear. It named 25 accused – six of whom had been named in Imran’s police complaint for “assaulting” him – and 25 “unidentified” others.
The next FIR
But soon after, another FIR was filed in Ahmednagar at the local police station.
The FIR based on Javed’s complaint was registered at 3 am on July 27.
Just three hours later, another was registered at 6.32 am against Imran and his 16-year-old sister. The penal charges included stalking and criminal intimidation, and they were also booked under POCSO Act and the IT Act.
Newslaundry learned that soon after Javed spoke to the police in the early hours of July 27, the Hindu minor girl Tanvi and her family arrived at the police station with a few other locals.
The FIR said Imran’s sister had invited Tanvi to have sweets on Eid last year. Imran’s sister then took a selfie of the three of them.
The FIR said: “Two days after Eid, Imran’s sister forced [Tanvi] to talk to her brother. She told her that Imran had made an Instagram account using her photos and uses it for chatting. If [Tanvi] did not talk to Imran, Imran’s sister would make her photos and chats viral on social media.”
It’s this FIR that first mentions Meher.
“Imran’s sister asked the complainant to join Meher’s tuition classes where Imran used to visit and harassed the complainant to elope with him,” the FIR said. “As per the complainant, Imran forced the complainant to elope with her and threatened to make her pictures and chats viral if she doesn’t submit to his demands.”
The police allegedly did not take action right away. Imran was in the hospital at the time and his sister is a minor.
The fourth and fifth FIRs
On July 28 and 29, two more FIRs were filed at the same police station. Both were filed by minor Hindu girls from the same village and named Imran, his sister, and seven others – Meher, Javed, Ahmad, Irfan, Mohsin, Zameer and Sahir.
Meher is Javed’s sister-in-law, as mentioned before. Imran, Mohsin and Sahir are friends. Ahmad and Irfan are relatives. Imran and Irfan are friends. Zameer is Mohsin’s father.
The complaints in both cases were virtually identical. One girl said she studied in Meher’s tuition class in 2021, the other said she took the class in 2022.
They claimed Meher urged minor Hindu girls in her class to “develop friendships” with Muslims and “start living like Muslims”. They claimed Meher “encouraged them to talk to Imran”.
Imran was accused of visiting the tuition classes and asking the two complainants “to elope with him”. He allegedly said “Javed, Ahmad and Irfan would help them elope” and allegedly “threatened” to post photos of the complainants online if they did not comply.
Imran’s sister was accused of, along with her brother, “telling the complainants they should become Muslim, wear burkha, and not wear bangles and bindis”.
Mohsin and Sahir purportedly “asked the complainants to get married to Imran”. Mohsin and Irfan were also accused of asking the complainants to “introduce them to her other classmates so they can elope with them”.
All nine – Imran, his minor sister, Meher, Javed and the others – were booked. There is no mention of sexual assault or abuse in the FIRs.
Arrests
Meher, Irfan, Sahir and Ahmad were arrested at 2.25 am on July 29. Javed was arrested later that day. Imran was arrested on August 4.
Javed, Zameer and Ahmad were granted bail by the Ahmednagar sessions court on August 19. Irfan and Sahir were granted bail on October 16.
Meher and Imran are still lodged at the local sub-jail. They have filed bail applications at the Bombay High Court. Their lawyer Mujahid Pathan told Newslaundry the entire case is “fake”.
“The complainant [Tanvi] was friends with Imran’s sister and they would visit each other’s homes. The families were on good terms,” he said. “Imran, his sister and Tanvi once took a selfie during Eid; she and Imran were on talking terms. This was not to the liking of some Hindutva extremist elements. So they attacked Imran, snatched his phone, found the selfie, and then created some rumours. Even though village elders settled the matter, they attacked the mosque in the evening. When the FIR was filed and the police arrested rioters, they filed FIRs with stories of conversions and abuse and whatnot.”
Meher’s husband told Newslaundry his wife teaches Classes 6 and 7 at a local school. Additionally, she has been giving tuitions at her home since 2016.
“If she had been involved in such acts – forcing minors to convert, influencing them to adopt Islam, asking them to befriend Muslim boys, trafficking – then at least one parent would have complained about it in all these years,” he pointed out. “But the FIRs were filed only after Javed complained against miscreants and after Imran complained of his assault. Now she is projected as some racketeer involved in religious conversion.”
He added, “This is unbelievable. The complaint says my wife did all this in 2021-22. In 2021, Covid restrictions were in place! There were no tuitions for the major part of the year. My wife has been targeted by extremist elements. A fabricated case has been made against her.”
With Meher in jail, the couple’s two-year-old daughter “cries a lot in her absence”, while their five-year-old son “keeps asking about her”. The husband said he’s told his son their mother is “in the hospital for medical care”.
Newslaundry contacted family members of the minor complainants to ask them about what had happened. None of them wanted to speak to this reporter except for the father of one of the complainants.
He said, “The tuition teacher used to tell the girls to talk to Muslim boys. She used to tell them Islam is better than Hinduism. She used to ask them to dress like Muslims. Two of the accused were involved in giving prize money to boys to elope with the Hindu girls – they were giving Rs 5 lakh each. They are getting funds from outside countries. I think they are getting funds from Pakistan.”
Enter the NCPCR
On July 31, the gram panchayat of the village sent a letter to BJP MLA Prasad Lad saying they would “stop sending Hindu girls to school due to love jihad in their village”.
On July 28, Lad would raise these “love jihad” concerns in the state assembly. He said the police had “falsely” charged Hindu men with vandalising a mosque and that the police was “not serious” about the love jihad claims.
On July 31, a group called the Legal Rights Observatory posted a copy of the letter on X, formerly Twitter. The group is run by Vinayak Joshi, a former RSS leader. They tagged NCPCR chairperson Kanoongo in their post too.
Kanoongo visited Ahmednagar in August and concluded that this was a case of “luring minor girls on pretext of coaching” in order to conduct “forcible religious conversion and trafficking of minor girls”. In October, he sent a copy of the report to the state’s chief secretary Manoj Saunik.
“The police cooked up the story of the mosque attack to give benefit to the accused,” he said. “The role of SP Rakesh Ola and additional SP Swati Bhor seems to be suspicious. There should be an investigation.”
Police version
Newslaundry spoke to Dhananjay Jadhav, a police inspector at the local police station, to ask him about the multiple FIRs.
“At 11.30 am on July 26, we received information that a boy made a video of a girl at the village. We went to the spot and saw 100 people outside the mosque. They said a Muslim boy had made a video of a Hindu girl, they said the boy is inside the mosque,” Jadhav said. “We checked inside the mosque and saw the boy. He was beaten badly. His name was Imran.”
Jadhav then “asked both parties if they wanted to file a case”. “They said the matter was resolved,” he said. “They also couldn’t show us any video made by that boy. I returned to the police station and made an entry in the file.”
At 7.30 pm that day, Jadhav was at a meeting near the village.
“We were about to end when we received information that a mob had vandalised the mosque at the village. We rushed to the spot,” he said. “Miscreants had removed the loudspeaker. They broke chairs and tables inside the mosque. We asked senior officials from the mosque to file a complaint.”
Javed came along to the police station, Jadhav said, and the FIR was filed at 3 am.
“The same night, we arrested around 14 people who vandalised the mosque,” he said. “A few hours later, the girl whose video was allegedly made came to the police station with her father and mother and others to file an FIR. We registered it.”
Jadhav then met Imran in the hospital.
“We took his statement and filed an FIR,” he said. “Then over the next two days, two more minor girls came to the police station and filed FIRs of a similar nature.”
But what about the NCPCR’s allegations that the police “cooked up” stories of the mosque being attacked?
Jadhav dismissed these allegations.
“The miscreants who vandalised the mosque realised they could land in big trouble,” he said. “They made up some story about a big racket, claiming the police favours a particular community and is not investigating properly. They cooked up that story and then the NCPCR chairperson came here.”
Jadhav pointed out there are already five FIRs in the case and numerous arrests. “We have not sided with any community. We did our job. Our investigations are still ongoing,” he said.
*Names changed because these details are related to POCSO cases.
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