On Monday (June 28), the Supreme Court of India dismissed a petition seeking protection of Hindus from the dominant Muslim community in the Nuh district (Mewat) of Haryana.

As per reports, the petition was filed by a group of lawyers and activists through advocate Vishnu Shankar Jain. It read, “A number of Hindus have been forcibly converted to Islam and a number of Hindu women and minor girls have been abducted and raped. The Hindu women are not safe at all. The Muslims at a large number have committed atrocities on members of Schedule caste.”

The petitioners highlighted that the local police, the district administration, and the State government have failed to exercise their power in upholding the life and liberty of the Hindu community. The petition stated that the Hindu population in Nuh had declined from 20% (in 2011) to 10-11% now while the Muslim population has increased under the patronage of Tablighi Jammat.

The petitioners relied on a report, dated May 31, 2020, by a four-member committee wherein it visited the affected area and submitted a copy of it to Haryana CM Manohar Lal Khattar. The petition stated, “(The State of Haryana has failed to) disclose the facts of various FIRs and complaints of various heinous crimes, lodged by Hindus against Muslims for their tortures and atrocities committed on them, leave apart taking any action on the said FIRs or complaints.”

While highlighting that the Nuh district of Haryana has been affected by anti-national elements, they said that the Hindu community has been forced to lead the ‘life of an animal’. As such, the petition urged the apex court to constitute a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of CBI, NIA officials, and a retired Supreme Court judge to look into the accusations of forceful conversions, rape of Hindu women and minor girls. The petitioners also asked the court to cancel all sale deeds made by Hindus under coercion in the past 10 years.

The petition was heard by a 3-Judge Bench of CJI NV Ramana, Justices Hrishikesh Roy and AS Bopanna. During the hearing, the CJI said, “We cannot entertain this plea based on newspaper reports.” The Supreme Court then dismissed the case, seeking protection for Hindus, after enquiring about additional affidavits.

Mewat – A hotbed of forced conversions and atrocities against Hindus

Mewat region, which falls over Rajasthan and Haryana, has been a hotbed of organised crime, cattle smuggling and illegal Rohingyas.

Earlier in February 2020, a gang-rape incident with a married woman was reported in a village in Tawadu, Mewat. The woman was abducted in September 2019 and held captive until she broke out of her captivity in on January 15, 2020. She had accused five men of kidnapping and gang-raping her for months. The woman alleged that while she was held captive, she was administered drugs by her captors and gang-raped. She also alleged that her kidnappers shot pornographic videos and threatened her of releasing them on the internet.

In September 2020, a 15-year-old teenager was abducted, drugged, and subsequently raped by 3 men—Ismail, Irshad and Sahir. The girl was gang-raped and tortured for over 28 hours in Pinangwa village of Nuh. The accused were known to the girl. According to the victim, when she had gone out in the morning to relieve herself, one of them, Ismail, lured her into going with him in a millet field nearby where he raped her. About 2 hours later, another one, Sahir came who raped her. Later, Irshad came and forced himself on her. The girl in her statement had said that she was drugged by the men before they raped her. 

In October last year, a terrifying incident of attempted love jihad and forced conversion of non-Muslim into Islam came to the fore with the blood-curdling murder of a 21-year-old student named Nikita Tomar in Faridabad. She was shot dead in broad daylight by two men outside the Aggarwal college in Ballabgarh, Faridabad earlier this week. One of the two assailants, Tauseef was harassing her and making advances at Nikita. She had filed a complaint of molestation and harassment against Tauseef last month and a compromise was reached later.

An FIR was filed by Nikita just a day before her murder, against the accused Tauseef harassing her and trying to convert her to Islam. The shocking incident was caught on camera, visuals of which had gone instantly viral in the aftermath of the brutal killing. Touseef and his accomplice Rehan were arrested by the police. The prime accused of Tomar’s murder, Touseef, belonged to Mewat, a region infamous for rampant abductions, rapes, and forcible religious conversions of Hindu and Dalit women into Islam by the radical Muslim inhabitants.