In June last year, Purola, a small town in Uttarakhand, was in tumult.
A campaign by Hindu right-wing groups demanding that the town be cleared of Muslims had made national headlines. At least 41 families left, with six of them permanently relocating to different parts of Uttarakhand almost overnight.
At the heart of this push by Hindutva groups was the allegation that two men, one of them Muslim, had tried to abduct a 14-year-old girl under the “ruse of marriage” and convert her to Islam.
The campaign kicked off an anti-Muslim frenzy across the Uttarkashi district, where Purola is located, as Hindutva outfits accused the two men – 22-year-old Uvaid Khan and his 24-year-old friend Jitendra Saini – of “love jihad”.
“Love jihad” is a conspiracy theory that accuses Muslim men of being part of an organised plot to trick unsuspecting Hindu women into romantic relationships to ultimately convert them to Islam.
Khan and Saini were not only booked for kidnapping and procurement of a minor under sections of the Indian Penal Code but also for sexual assault under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, or Pocso.
Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which governs the state, stirred up the communal pot with insinuations about “outsiders from a certain community” swamping the hills.
A year later, however, the case against Khan and Saini has collapsed. On May 10, a court in Uttarkashi acquitted both men after it found that the allegations against them were false.
The court’s judgement raises questions over the role of the police in whipping up the hysteria against Muslims. During the trial, the 14-year-old girl told the court that the police had tutored her to accuse Khan and Saini of trying to abduct her.
The court also found inconsistencies in the statement of the sole eyewitness in the case – Aashish Chunar, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
How it started
Nearly 99% of Purola’s 35,000 residents are Hindus. Over the years, a few dozen Muslim families had moved to the hill town from the plains of western Uttar Pradesh to run businesses.
One of them was the family of Uvaid Khan, who had arrived in Purola from Bijnor in 2011. They owned shops dealing in furniture, mattresses and ice-cream on the town’s Kumola Road. Across the road was the shop of Jitendra Saini, a mechanic who, too, had moved to the hill town from Bijnor in 2021.
Khan and Saini were friends. Their social media profiles show them travelling together and flaunting pictures from a gym located two floors above Uvaid’s shops.
But their lives were about to change.
On May 31, the Times of India reported an “alleged ‘love jihad’ case” in Purola involving two young men, “including one from a minority community”.
“Both were caught while allegedly trying to elope with a Hindu girl” on May 26, the report said.
The two men in question were Khan and Saini. The minor was an orphan from a Hindu family, looked after by her uncle and aunt.
The other theory, The Print reported, was that the men had “allegedly abducted a minor girl in Purola town”.
Within days, Hindutva groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Devbhoomi Raksha Abhiyan held large protests against Muslims in Purola and in the neighbouring town of Barkot, calling them “jihadis”.
Pawan Nautiyal, the general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttarkashi, mobilised Purola’s Hindu traders and told them that Muslims “initiate conversations with innocent women here, mislead them and take them away”, The Morning Context reported.
Television news channels added fuel to the fire. India TV, for instance, reported that “the moment the two [Khan and Saini] tried to push the minor into the car, she began screaming very loudly. Hearing the girl’s scream, the mother came outside the house and saved her along with other shopkeepers who arrived at the spot.”
“The audacity and foolishness of the love jihadis have fired up Hindutva groups,” added the reporter.
An anchor on News18 UP Uttarakhand claimed that there was a “sudden spurt” in “love jihad” cases in the hill state. “It is now clear that love jihadis are playing a dirty game in the mountains,” she added.
Fearing for their safety, Muslim families shut their shops. In June, Newslaundry reported that 35 families left the town temporarily and six families moved out permanently.
Saini and Khan were sent to the Tehri district jail. In July last year, when the cameras panned away from Purola, a district and sessions court judge in Uttarkashi, Gurubaksh Singh, granted bail to the two men.
What the court found
The trial against Uvaid Khan and Jitendra Saini stretched over 19 hearings between August 2023 and May 2024.
The allegations of kidnapping, procurement of a minor and sexual assault against the duo turned out to be false, beginning with the details of the incident on May 26, 2023 that upended their lives.
The main eyewitness of the incident was Aashish Chunar, a 27-year-old RSS member who runs a computer shop in the town.
At 3.07 pm that day, Chunar called the minor’s uncle, informing him that two men near the town’s petrol pump were trying to get his niece to climb into a tempo, according to the first information report filed by the uncle at Purola police station. The men were trying to take her to Naugaon, a town 18 km away, Chunar had said.
They fled after Chunar intervened, according to the complaint. The RSS worker then brought the girl to his shop.
In the complaint, the uncle described what his niece had purportedly told him. Khan and Saini had brought her to the petrol pump through deceit. Khan had introduced himself as Ankit. At the petrol pump, they called a tempo driver and tried to lure her into marriage and take her away when Chunar and another person saw her and rescued her, the complaint said.
During the trial, when the minor’s uncle was cross-examined by the defendants’ advocates, he told the court that his niece “did not tell him anything about the incident” and that he wrote the complaint “on Aashish Chunar’s instruction”.
“I wrote what Aashish Chunar told me,” the court’s judgement quotes him as saying.
During cross-examination, the girl’s aunt also told the court that her niece “did not tell her about the incident and did not name the accused”. “She only said that she had left the house to get some clothes stitched and that Aashish Chunar then took her to his shop,” said the judgement.
Khan and Saini were produced before Chunar during the trial. Chunar told the court that on May 26, he saw two men talking to the minor. But Khan and Saini, he added, were not those two men.
Chunar told Scroll that he had joined the RSS in 2017 as a media in-charge in Uttarkashi. “That day, I saw her talking to two men from a distance,” he said. “But I don’t know if they were Saini or that other Muslim boy.”
Chunar denied the allegation that the minor’s uncle wrote the police complaint on his instruction.
Finally, the minor’s account in court contradicted her statement made on May 27, 2023 to a civil judge under Section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code.
In that statement, a copy of which was seen by Scroll, the minor said that after she had asked them for directions to the tailor’s shop, Khan and Saini took her to the petrol station and called a tempo. “They held my hand and tried to make me sit inside the tempo,” she said. “I said let go of my hand. Then my relative Aashish Chunar came. The two men ran away once they saw him. He [Chunar] sat me down in his shop and called my family.”
During her cross-examination, the minor told court that the police had tutored her to make the statement implicating Khan and Saini. “Before I gave the statement, the police had explained to me what all I had to say and that is what I told madam [civil judge],” she said. “I did not read the statement but only signed it.”
In court, she recounted what had happened that day. “She mostly said that she asked the accused about a tailor’s shop,” the judgement said. “She went to the tailor’s shop with the accused. She also said that the accused were not taking her anywhere. Upon cross-examination, she said that the accused had not followed her.”
Judge Gurubaksh Singh noted that the prosecution had not put forth any statement or evidence to prove that Khan and Saini had touched the minor with sexual intent.
Taking all this into account, Judge Singh acquitted Khan and Saini.
“Considering the material available on the record, this special court has come to the conclusion that from all the oral and documentary evidence presented by the prosecution, the prosecution of accused Uvaid Khan and Jitendra Saini is not proven beyond reasonable doubt,” he wrote in the judgement.
The police officials who handled the case refuted the girl’s allegation that they had tutored her. “What would the police get out of doing that?” asked KC Chauhan, the then station house officer of the Purola police station. “The girl must be lying. She was not mentally sound anyway,” he told Scroll.
Chauhan is now posted in the state’s vigilance establishment, which works with the government in cases of corruption, bribery, misconduct, and misbehaviour involving public servants.
Deepti Jagwan, the investigating officer in the case, declined to comment.
The conspiracy
Halim Baig, the advocate who represented Khan and Saini, told Scroll that both men had moved back to Bijnor after the incident.
“Even today, I do not know how this story about these two men trying to abduct the girl came about and then became national news,” said Baig. “To me, it seemed like a planned conspiracy. Khan’s family ran a very successful business in the town. Many people did not like that.”
In June 2023, this reporter had written in The Morning Context about how the anti-Muslim rhetoric in Purola was stoked in a WhatsApp group of the town’s traders and shopkeepers, which included local journalist Anil Aswal.
The minor’s uncle had told Newslaundry that Aswal had urged him to file a “fake complaint” with the police alleging his niece had been a victim of “love jihad” and blame Khan, but he had refused. The complaint he filed did not make any mention of “love jihad”.
Nevertheless, on the evening of May 26, Aswal published a story on his website bbckhabar.in that spun the incident as a “love jihad” conspiracy. He said that he had written a similar story for the Hindi newspaper Amar Ujala the following day.
Aswal’s stories put the traders in the WhatsApp group on a mission to teach Purola’s Muslims a lesson. “There is still time. Wake up everyone,” one of them wrote to the group. “If we spare them today, then these people will grow more confident tomorrow. Going ahead, don’t let them become powerful.”
The vitriol against Muslims also came from Uttarakhand’s BJP leaders. Purola MLA Durgeshwar Lal ranted against Muslim traders and “those who funded them” in a video interview that has more than 1.2 lakh views on Facebook.
Chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami told the press that “love jihad will not be tolerated” in the state, and that what happened in Purola was a “crime” that was “being committed as part of a conspiracy”.
The frenzy ultimately fizzled out in court, but it wrecked livelihoods. Zahid Malik, who owned a cloth shop in Purola for nearly two decades, had to permanently leave the town with his family after the Hindutva protests in June 2023. They moved to Dehradun.
“I never went back to Purola after that incident. We had a good business there. But all that is gone now,” Malik told Scroll. “My cloth business in Dehradun did not take off. I had to borrow money and we have accumulated a debt of Rs 15 lakh. The loan sharks visit and ask for money every now and then. We have been ruined.”
