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Sena stirs up a conversion
controversy in Delhi

Josy Joseph in New Delhi

Shiv Sena leaders in the national capital have dared the police to arrest them after they were booked for "re-converting" two boys to Hinduism against the wishes of their Muslim mother.

But the city police are in no mood to oblige the Sena leaders, who believe their arrest will give them the necessary publicity and further political mileage. Their arrests may also worsen the communal situation in the slum clusters where the two children stay, warns Jai Bhagwan Goel, the Shiv Sena chief in Delhi.

The controversy revolving around three children of a Bangladeshi migrant woman who was 'bought' for Rs 2,500 by a Delhi Hindu 15 years ago brings out again the ugly underbelly of the city's slum clusters.

The issue of Bangladeshi migrants has always been a sensitive one, one that right-wing parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party, flog during elections.

Goel says he is moving the Delhi high court to quash the first information report lodged against him and others accused of re-converting the boys and demand that the government take immediate steps to "purge" Delhi of about 500,000 "illegal" refugees from Bangladesh.

He told rediff.com that the Shiv Sena is now planning to take the controversy a step further and begin a movement to "reconvert" those Muslims "who were originally Hindus, but were forcefully converted to Islam over the years." The Sena, he said, would provide "security and resettlement assurance" to all those who wished to return to the Hindu fold.

Goel and his supporters are no strangers to controversy. He was responsible for the infamous incident of digging the pitch at the Ferozshah Kotla and had also led the protests against Deepa Mehta's controversial movie, Fire.

Goel says he got his latest brainwave after a Sena activist in north Delhi's Timarpur area, Anand Trivedi, approached him with a complaint from one Ram Singh.

The complaint was against Khatum Begum, 30, whom Ram Singh claimed as his wife after his brother and her first husband Nain Singh died about eight months back.

Khatum Begum, however, did not want to be Ram Singh's wife and so eloped with a neighbour, Muhammed Umer, to Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh, where she got her three children from her first marriage, Sudha (14), Satvir (8) and Sudheer (4), converted to Islam. They were then renamed Sannu, Shaan Mohammed and Chand Mohammed.

About three months back the family returned to Delhi and began living in Timarpur. One day, according to Ram Singh, Satvir aka Shaan Mohammed ran away to his house and narrated the entire story of their conversion and alleged harassment by Umer. Singh, with local support, went to the police station and filed a complaint.

The local police strangely allowed Ram Singh to take the three children to his house where, with the Shiv Sena's help, he "reconverted" them to Hinduism on June 26. According to Goel, an assistant commissioner of police and the station house officer of the local police station witnessed the ceremony.

But Khatum Begum filed her own complaint at the Civil Lines police station, in which she narrated the shocking story of a woman who was a slave as well as wife to a man who bought her for a paltry Rs 2,500 some 15 years earlier.

According to FIR 186/2002 of June 26, Khatum Begum reached New Delhi 15 years ago with another woman, who sold her to Nain Singh. Nain Singh fathered three children with her before dying some eight months back.

After Nain Singh died, his family forced Khatum Begum to marry his younger brother Ram Singh, though it is not clear if a marriage ceremony did indeed take place.

The Shiv Sena leader Goel argues that "Under Hindu custom, after a man dies, if his younger brother is unmarried, he marries the elder brother's widow to protect the family prestige."

Khatum Begum, however, said in her complaint that she was coerced to marry Ram Singh, but ran away with Umer to whom she got married in Moradabad, where her children were also converted to Islam.

But the Shiv Sena leaders claim that Umer was already married to another woman who had in the past filed a dowry harassment complaint against him. They also accuse Umer of being involved in a murder case in Meerut sometime back.

But Umer is not the target of the Sena which hopes to gain much more from this controversy. Goel says he will revive the call for "cleansing Delhi" of about 500,000 illegal Bangladeshi refugees. The high court is already hearing a writ filed by him on the issue.

The Delhi police has booked the Shiv Sena activists and Ram Singh under section 295-A of the Indian Penal Code for deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings.

But realising the predicament lying ahead, a senior Delhi police officer said they are still "discussing various aspects" of the case and hinted that they may yet not give the Sena, an insignificant political force in Delhi, a chance to spread its wings.

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