In May last year, two young men from Himachal Pradesh travelled to Chakrata town in Uttarakhand with their woman friend.
Early morning on May 23, the group was accosted by members of the Bajrang Dal and another Hindutva vigilante group, Rudra Sena, who accused the men, Shahrukh, 19, and Showkeen, 20, both Muslim hairdressers from Paonta Sahib, of kidnapping the Hindu woman. They were humiliated on camera. The video garnered more than two lakh views on Facebook.
Instead of acting against the attackers, the police arrested the men under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, or POCSO Act. They were charged under Sections 5 and 6 of the Act, which pertain to penetrative sexual assault, in addition to sections of the Indian Penal Code on procuring a minor and kidnapping.
This was not unusual.
Just earlier that week, in another Uttarakhand town, Purola, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh had accused a Muslim man and his Hindu accomplice of trying to abduct a 14-year-old Hindu girl. The men were arrested under the POCSO Act. Hindutva vigilantes used the incident to whip up frenzy over “love jihad”, claiming Muslims were conspiring to lure unsuspecting Hindu women into romantic relationships to ultimately convert them to Islam. Many Muslim families had to leave the town.
A year later, as Scroll reported, the Purola case collapsed in court. Both the men were acquitted in May this year after the minor rebutted the claims.
While the Chakrata case is still ongoing, Shahrukh and Showkeen were granted bail by the Uttarakhand High Court in November 2023. Their lawyer argued that they had been “falsely implicated”, and that the victim is a major who had “turned hostile”. The court noted that the state had conceded that “the victim did not support the case of the prosecution”.
“During the trial, the girl told the court that the case is fabricated, and that she is under pressure from her parents to blame Shahrukh and Showkeen,” said Surendra Mittal, their advocate. “She said that she knows the two men, who are close to her aunt’s family.”
The cases in Chakrata and Purola are among the thousands filed under the POCSO Act in Uttarakhand in recent years. The state has seen a nearly four-fold rise in the number of such cases between 2016 and 2023. Most cases do not stand judicial scrutiny, advocates and police officials say. Data from one district court analysed by Scroll shows a high rate of acquittals.
The data also shows that every fourth accused in POCSO cases in that district is Muslim.
There are fears the law is being misused to target the community, which constitutes less than 14% of the state’s population but is increasingly in the line of fire in the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state.
A jump in POCSO cases
Between 2016 and 2022, according to data published by the National Crime Records Bureau, the POCSO crime rate in Uttarakhand has increased by 300%.
In 2016, the state registered 218 cases under the Act. This put the POCSO crime rate in Uttarakhand – the number of cases per lakh persons – at 5.7. By 2022, the number of cases had risen to 851, and the crime rate had shot up to 22.4.
The number dropped marginally to 823 cases in 2023, according to a response by the State Crime Record Bureau to a right to information application from Scroll.
The inflection point was 2020, when the POCSO crime rate in Uttarakhand surged ahead of the national crime rate for the first time. Strikingly, this surge was not seen in the neighbouring states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
And yet, the rise in the registration of POCSO cases in Uttarakhand might not mean that sexual offences against children in the state are increasing dramatically.
In several POCSO cases analysed by Scroll, the accused and the alleged victim were in a consensual romantic relationship. The complaints, we found, were filed by a relative opposed to the relationship – a trend also noted in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Assam.
One of the consequences of this overzealousness has been a rise in the incarceration of young men, mostly teenagers. The Haldwani sub-jail, for instance, holds 247 POCSO detainees as of July 31, 2024, according to a response to a Right to Information application by Scroll. The Roorkee sub-jail in Haridwar district has 14 POCSO undertrials, as of August 2024.
In July, the Uttarakhand High Court had warned the police against arresting teenage boys for going out on dates with minor girls. “At the most, he can be called for giving him advice not to indulge in these things, but he should not be arrested,” the court said. The bench was hearing a petition that raised an alarm about the parents of teenage girls filing false police complaints against their children’s romantic partners, putting the boys’ future in jeopardy.
Malika Virdi, an activist with the Uttarakhand Mahila Manch, said that given the high rate of acquittal, POCSO cases could be a way to clamp down on relationships that break caste and community barriers. “The misuse of the POCSO law could be a form of social control,” she said. “The upper-castes in Uttarakhand cannot tolerate inter-caste or inter-faith unions. There have been several instances recently where inter-caste unions have faced violent backlash.”
‘Paid to trap Hindu girls’
But the community worst affected by this trend are Muslims. An analysis by Scroll of POCSO cases in Dehradun district between 2015 and 2023 shows that in each year, at least one in four accused was Muslim. The community forms just 11.91% of the population of the district, according to the 2011 census.
Senior advocate Razia Beig told Scroll that the POCSO Act “has been turned into a joke” in Uttarakhand. “There has been a flood of POCSO cases in the state since 2019, and many of them are against male Muslim teenagers,” she said. “The FIRs are written on the instruction of groups like Bajrang Dal and chargesheets are filed without any actual investigation.”
The prejudice against Muslims within state institutions appears to be driving the misuse of the law. For example, a senior member of the Uttarakhand Commission for Protection Of Child Rights, appointed by the BJP government, told Scroll that a significant reason for the increase in POCSO cases in the state are Muslims themselves. “Muslim men are being trained and paid to trap Hindu girls. They have a whole system to defend themselves,” said the official. “The demography of Uttarakhand has changed in the last decade. They [Muslims] are everywhere now.”
Hindus account for an overwhelming majority of Uttarakhand’s population (82.97%), while Muslims are 13.95% of the state’s population, according to the 2011 Census. The population of Muslims was 11.9% in the 2001 Census.
Muslim men in the crosshairs
In Dehradun, Hindu extremist outfits have repeatedly targeted Muslim men and teenagers over interfaith relationships.
Several such cases have been reported from Vikas Nagar, a town in Dehradun district, home to the founder of Rudra Sena, Rakesh Tomar Uttarakhandi, who has fashioned himself as a vigilante who saves Hindu women from “love jihad” and inter-faith relationships.
Uttarakhandi was part of the group that ambushed Shahrukh and Showkeen in Chakrata. He released the video showing them getting humiliated.
Another young man implicated under the POCSO Act because of Uttarakhandi is a 23-year-old mechanic, who is Showkeen and Shahrukh’s friend.
On May 17, 2023, a woman named Puja approached the Vikas Nagar police station and filed an FIR against the mechanic, Shahid, alleging that he had forced himself into their home earlier that day, and molested her and her daughter. (The names of the accused and the complainant have been changed on request, to protect their identities.)
Puja alleged this was not the first time Shahid had sexually assaulted her daughter. Three years ago, when her daughter was 15, Shahid had shot videos of her and had used them to assault her on multiple occasions since then, Puja claimed.
Shahid was booked under Section 3 and 4 of the POCSO Act. He was also charged with IPC sections on rape, criminal intimidation, outraging modesty of a woman and breach of peace.
Puja’s daughter, 18, did not stick by her mother’s story. In her statement before the magistrate, seen by Scroll, she said that he was in love with Shahid and wanted to marry him. He had not sexually assaulted her, she added, and they had had consensual sex in December 2022 – after she turned 18.
Her medico-legal report said that “no definite opinion can be given about rape on the basis of [the] report and [the] examination”.
In a longer letter and a video statement to the senior superintendent of police, Dehradun, in June 2023, the 18-year-old went into darker details.
She wrote that she had known Shahid since they were children. She liked him and had told him this recently. She decided she would marry Shahid and leave her home – something her mother knew about and agreed to.
“We went to court to get married but we were accosted by the Bajrang Dal members,” she wrote. “They now come to my house and physically assault me. They caught Shahid and threw him into jail. One man called Rakesh Uttarakhandi sends five-six men to my house every day to beat me up and say in court that Shahid raped me and that he has fed me something to be on his side. But all this is false.”
The 18-year-old alleged that Uttarakhandi and his men put pressure on her by assaulting her with batons and rocks, or by locking her into a room and releasing smoke from dried red chillies into it. “Rakesh Uttarakhandi and his men have threatened me that if I do not speak out against Shahid that they will have both of us killed,” she wrote.
In Dehradun, the case against Shahid is still being heard in the district court. After the FIR, the 23-year-old spent six months in jail. He was granted bail in October 2023 and moved out of Vikas Nagar fearing for his life. “In the last two-three years, there have been dozens of cases in Vikas Nagar where POCSO is used against Muslims like this,” Shahid told Scroll. “The police station there is practically run by the Bajrang Dal.”
The Vikas Nagar police station registers at least 12 POCSO cases a year, according to Rajesh Shah, the station house officer. “Hindu groups [like Rudra Sena and Bajrang Dal] tend to get involved in POCSO cases,” said Shah. “They protest outside and raise slogans so that we take action. But the police officials act in accordance with the law.”
From a holiday in Nainital to a prison
In many cases, it is not only the state or the Hindutva organisations that have used the POCSO law in interfaith relationships but also family members of young girls.
Sometimes the provocation is as minor as teenagers going on a holiday.
Four teenagers did just that in December 2022. (Their names have been changed on request.)
A photograph from their holiday shows Shreya, 17, in a blue top, with her hand around Wasim, 19, in a brown jacket. It was taken on a sunny day in Nainital in Uttarakhand. She looks at him fondly while he beams at the camera.
In another photograph, the girl is kissing the boy on the cheek.
That Christmas, Shreya and Wasim were in Nainital with two other friends, Payal and Irfan, posing playfully on the streets of the hill town. In one of the photographs, Payal kneels before Irfan as if to make a proposal. In another, all four of them stand side by side, holding hands.
Months later, the photos went viral in Shreya’s neighbourhood in Haldwani. In July 2023, after a complaint by her elder brother, Wasim was arrested and charged under provisions of the POCSO Act.
Wasim and Shreya had met at a wedding a few years ago and the two had connected on Instagram, according to the FIR filed by her brother at Haldwani’s Mukhani police station in July 2023.
In late 2022, when Shreya was 17, Wasim took her to Kaladhungi town in Nainital district. There, he “physically forced himself” on her in a “jungle on the Kaladhungi road”, the FIR alleged. It added: “He also clicked pictures of me and threatened to make them viral if I told my family about the incident.”
The complaint adds that Wasim sexually assaulted Shreya again in June 2023.
Hours after it filed the FIR, the Mukhani police arrested Wasim. They also booked his friend Irfan in a case of sexual assault against Payal, based on a copy-cat complaint filed by her. In both cases, the men were charged under POCSO Sections 5 and 6, which deal with penetrative sexual assault, and with rape under the Indian Penal Code.
In his bail plea a year later, Wasim pleaded innocence. “The victim has been tutored by her family to give the statement,” he alleged. “Whenever she left home to meet the accused, she did it by her own will and did not inform her family.”
During the investigation, the police spoke with Payal, who said that Shreya and Wasim were “boyfriend and girlfriend” and Shreya had also introduced her to him.
Wasim argued that there is no independent witness to support the allegations made by Shreya and her brother.
In July 2023, Shreya’s medico-legal examination report, seen by Scroll, concluded that “no definite opinion on sexual assault can be made”.
While hearing Wasim’s bail plea in June 2024, the Uttarakhand High Court said that “it appears that the parties were in a relationship”.
Citing legal precedents, Justice Ravindra Maithani noted that in similar cases across the country, courts “have either granted bail or quashed the proceedings or acquitted the accused in the cases like instant one.”
Wasim was granted bail, Irfan is still in prison. “The two of them [Wasim and Shreya] knew each other and were in a romantic relationship,” said advocate Saeed Ahmad. “This is a misuse of the POCSO Act by the family.” The case is still going on.
