After conversion, they run for cover

The couple’s relatives and community members are demanding that the couple be produced before them. “We have to find out whether they were lured with incentives or threatened to adopt Islam or whether they did it voluntarily,” says Tej. He has not lodged a formal FIR so far, but he says he has given a complaint to the area police where he has accused three persons of holding the couple in their custody.

The relatives say a local homeopathic doctor, Asif (said to be a Brahmin convert) who was a frequent visitor to the couple’s household, acted as the catalyst. “We did not like Asif’s visits, which I told my brother-in-law and his family,” says Tej. Two months ago, when I told them to stop entertaining him, they went off in a huff to my younger brother Rajkumar’s place in Morta village.” When tempers cooled, the family returned.

Members of the Muslim community allege that after their conversion, the relatives threw them out in the middle of the night. The family has reportedly been given shelter in one of the Muslim-dominated villges.

“What’s wrong with voluntary conversion? After all, it’s a free country,” say community elders Sadeeq, Anees and Saeed. They point out that Om Prakash had been practising Islamic rituals for the past 17-18 years ever since he arrived with his wife in his in-laws’ village. He procured a certificate of conversion only recently, says Senior Superintendent of Police, R.P. Singh. It’s no forcible conversion, clarified the SSP.

Both the girls knew Urdu and Arabic, and had even filled up the Aligarh university’s private Urdu examination forms, say locals. The girls could read the holy Quran, added Mohd Shohrab.

Predictably, the situation has got politicised, with local units of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad demanding that the community produce the family to ascertain whether they were forcibly converted. “If he had problems marrying off his daughters, we are even prepared to raise Rs one or two lakh,” says VHP Meerut Mahanagar chief, Krishan Johri. But the administration is not allowing us to speak to the couple, he alleged. The VHP has threatened to launch an agitation if the couple was not produced before them. The villagers too are gearing up for a showdown. “We will not sit silently,” says Balbir Singh Yadvav of the neighbouring Jhakeda village.

On Friday, Hindu dominated villages held their panachayat in Dolcha yesterday, which was attended by representatives of 40 villages, claims Balbir Singh. Following this, Muslims too held their own panchayat. “We don’t want bloodshed or communal trouble here,” says villager Babar Qasmi. We will not allow the village’s name to be blotted by this kind of thing, he adds.

The SSP claims the situation is under control. District magistrate Avneesh Kumar Awasthi has ordered a magisterial inquiry, Singh says.