MP: Man arrested for alleged forcible religious conversion of boy

PTI, Jul 16, 2023, 6:31 PM IST

Police have arrested a man in Madhya Pradesh’s Indore after the father of an eight-year-old boy complained that he forcibly converted his son to Islam, an official said on Sunday.

According to police, the boy and his mother had been living with the accused since the past few years and the complainant came to know about their whereabouts only recently as they had gone ”missing” from a train in 2018. Khajrana police station in-charge Dinesh Verma said the man lodged a complaint against the 32-year-old accused, following which the police registered a case and arrested him late Saturday night. The accused is a resident of Raja Colony in Indore’s Khajrana area.

The police filed the case under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 420 (cheating), 467, 468, 471 (all pertaining to forgery) and 34 (common intention) and also under provisions of the Madhya Pradesh Religious Freedom Act, 2021. The complainant, a resident of Barmer in Rajasthan, had got married in Shajapur in 2014, Verma said. ”In 2018, the couple came to Shajapur in Madhya Pradesh from Barmer to attend a family function. While returning home to Rajasthan in a train, his wife along with their son went missing all of a sudden,” the police official said while quoting the complaint.

”The man looked for them at all possible places. Recently, he came to know that his wife was living with the accused along with his (complainant’s) eight-year-old son, following which he approached the police,” Verma said.

During the investigation, it came to light that the accused man and the woman had fraudulently made a birth certificate of the boy and entered the name of the accused as his father in place of the complainant, who is his biological father, he said.

The police official said that the complainant’s allegation that his son was forcibly converted to Islam is being investigated.