Islamic preachers, 10 others sentenced for life in UP religious conversion case

A special NIA-Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) court in Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday awarded life sentence to 12 people, including Islamic preacher Maulana Kalim Siddiqui and Islamic Da'wah Centre founder Mohammed Umar Gautam, in a 2021 case of an illegal religious conversion racket.

Special judge Vivekanand Sharan Tripathi, in his order, gave a 10-year jail sentence to four others, while imposing heavy fines on the convicts and awarding compensation to the victims.

The accused were running an outfit involved in converting students with hearing disabilities and poor people to Islam in Uttar Pradesh with suspected funding from Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI, officials said.

Gautam lived in Batla House of Jamia Nagar in Delhi and had converted to Islam from Hinduism. During interrogation, he boasted to the police of having converted "at least 1,000 people to Islam", luring them with marriage, money and jobs, director-general of police Prashant Kumar, who was at the time holding charge of the ATS also, had said.

Besides Gautam and Maulana Kalim Siddiqui, the others sentenced to life are Irfan Sheikh, Salauddin Zainuddin Sheikh, Prasad Rameshwar Kanware alias Adam, Arsalan Mustafa alias Bhupriya Bandon, Kaushar Alam, Faraz Shah, Maulana Kalim Siddiqui, Dheeraj Govind Rao Jagtap, Sarfaraz Ali Jafri, Qazi Jahangir and Abdullah Umar under IPC section 121A (conspiracy to commit offence against the State).

Four others — Mohd. Salim, Rahul Bhola, Mannu Yadav, Kunal Ashok Chaudhary — along with these 12 people have been awarded 10 years imprisonment under UP Prohibition of Religious Conversion Act 2021, the court said.

The court has imposed heavy fines on all the convicts. The court said that the time spent in jail in this case shall be adjusted in the maximum period of sentence awarded to the convicts.

The court has directed that the victims of religious conversion — Aditya Gupta and Mohit Chaudhary — would be paid Rs 2 lakh compensation each. It further said the district legal services authority, Lucknow shall decide the compensation to be paid to the other two victims, Nitin Pant and Paresh Leeladhar Harode.

The outfit they operated was named Islamic Da'wah Centre, having access to funds from Pakistan's ISI and other foreign agencies, Kumar had told reporters.

The ATS arrested the accused from different parts of the country in various operations after it lodged an FIR in Lucknow and launched an investigation into alleged illegal religious conversion and foreign funding.