New Delhi: While convicting 16 persons in a mass conversion case and sentencing 12 of them to life in prison, a local court in Uttar Pradesh referred to the atrocities suffered by Hindus during the recent political upheaval in Bangladesh and observed that this was an example of the consequences of “demographic imbalance” in the country due to fundamentalist Islam.

While pronouncing life sentences to prominent Islamic scholar Maulana Kaleem Siddiqui and preacher Umar Gautam, the Lucknow court said the convicted persons used unlawful conversion as their “main weapon” as part of “extensive unconventional warfare” against the Indian state.

In the 264-page verdict – a copy of which is with The Wire – special judge of the National Investigation Agency-Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) court Vivekanand Sharan Tripathi took into perspective two books – including a dubious one – an article on Muslims and their population and a recent controversial observation made by a judge of the Allahabad high court on India’s ‘majority’ population possibly turning into a ‘minority’ due to conversions.

Judge Tripathi found the accused persons, especially Siddiqui and Gautam – described as the masterminds of the mass conversion case – guilty of trying to work with the “mindset” of transforming India into a “Dar-ul-Islam” or “House of Islam” through a wide network of illegal conversions.

He concluded that Gautam, Siddiqui and others were inspired by the “fundamentalist Jihadi ideology” of the controversial Islamic preacher of Jamaican origin Bilal Philips and extremist American Islamic preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who was linked to the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda.

Through connections with these two controversial characters and their organisations, the accused persons were working to convert India into a “Dar-ul Islam”, said Judge Tripathi.

His court on Wednesday (September 11) sentenced 12 persons to life and awarded a ten-year jail term to four others after finding them guilty of running an inter-state syndicate for unlawfully converting Hindus to Islam.

This was the first major instance of a conviction in a mass conversion case in Uttar Pradesh after the Yogi Adityanath-led government introduced a controversial law against unlawful conversion in 2020-21.

The 16 persons were convicted under Sections 3, 5 and 8 of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021 as well as sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC)........

© The Wire