“Mujhe help chahiye, mere ghar walon ne mujhe bandi bana rakha hai.”
Help me, my family has been keeping me captive, 25-year-old Sonika Chauhan had pleaded in a surreptitious message to Scroll on June 12.
Until a few weeks ago, Chauhan was running a beauty parlour in the National Capital Region’s Ghaziabad city. Next door, Akbar Khan, her 29-year-old husband, operated a centre to help people fill out government forms.
The two had got married privately in August 2022 but did not move in together. They were trying to convince Chauhan’s family to approve of their union, Khan told Scroll. They hoped to hold a wedding reception with the two families at a hill station later this year.
But their plans were violently upended on May 24. In mere 48 hours, Chauhan’s family has prevented her from meeting Khan and their businesses were vandalised by a mob that saw their marriage as a case of so-called love jihad.
Love jihad is a Hindutva conspiracy theory that holds that Muslim men pose as Hindus to trick Hindu women into relationships with the aim of converting them to Islam.
Chauhan said she has since been held captive by her parents. Khan spent two weeks in prison for purportedly abducting his own wife.
At the scene when the mob gathered at the shops run by Chauhan and Khan on May 26 was a Bharatiya Janata Party leader and a former municipal councillor called Meena Bhandari.
Chauhan alleged that Bhandari had played a key role in the events leading up to Khan’s arrest. It is all Meena Bhandari’s doing, Chauhan claimed.
But Bhandari denies these allegations. “I would have to be a very powerful person for the police to do as I say,” she said. “But I do accept that I came forward to help the Chauhan family in this case. I will keep doing whatever I can to have miscreants like him [Khan] punished.”
A violent evening
Neighbours who saw the couple run their businesses side by side for several years expressed surprise at the violent turn that events took that evening.
“I cannot understand what went wrong,” said a tailor who works across the road from them. “They spent all their time together and everybody knew about them. Her father or brother would drop her at the parlour every morning and pick her up in the evening.”
Khan’s relatives said that the two families had cordial relations. “We celebrated all festivals together and visited each other’s homes often,” said his nephew. A niece countered the “love jihad” allegations against her uncle by pulling up pictures on her phone that showed the couple praying at a Hindu temple.
Khan and Chauhan had been married under the Special Marriage Act on August 29, 2022. Scroll has seen the marriage certificate and spoken to one of the three witnesses listed in the document to verify its authenticity.
“The marriage is absolutely genuine,” the witness said. “Both of them appeared before the sub-divisional magistrate. They were both adults and decided to marry each other of their own accord.”
But Chauhan’s parents claim that they did not know about the marriage. Laxman Singh Chauhan, her father, told The Indian Express that he learned of it only three weeks ago, on May 24. That evening, he turned up at the beauty parlour with his wife to confront the couple.
Sonika Chauhan alleged that they beat her and tried to pressure her to divorce Khan. The couple left for Prayagraj that night to seek protection from Allahabad High Court, Khan said.
Chauhan’s parents were acting on pressure from Meena Bhandari, the BJP leader, the couple alleged. “She used to come home and ask my mother to get us divorced,” Chauhan claimed.
Added Khan: “Bhandari would tell her parents that their community would disown them for letting their daughter marry a Muslim. They were under tremendous social pressure for the last six months.”
However, Bhandari claimed that she only stepped in after the couple ran away on May 24. “I got a call from someone saying Laxman Singh Chauhan’s daughter had eloped with Akbar Khan,” she said. “I knew the family from before because we are both from Uttarakhand. That is why I went to Indirapuram police station.”
There, she demanded that Khan be arrested. She refused to leave the police station till the officers on duty assured her that it would be done the following day, Bhandari said. The next morning she was at the police station once again.
The pressure led the couple to abort their trip to Prayagraj midway and come back to present themselves before the Ghaziabad police on the afternoon of May 25, Khan said. They did so, he added, because they feared for his family’s safety.
They hoped that the police would record Chauhan’s statement confirming their marriage and put an end to their ordeal. Instead, the police arrested Khan and forced Chauhan to go with her parents, the couple said.
Khan, two of his sisters, one sister-in-law and a Hindu neighbour were all arrested for allegedly confining Chauhan in the beauty parlour and then abducting her. According to the first information report seen by Scroll, the police also invoked a charge of rioting against him even though no such incident had taken place that day.
The next evening, on May 26, a mob of about “50-60 people” vandalised the couple’s businesses, according to a second FIR registered at the Indirapuram police station.
This FIR was registered against unknown persons. But locals who witnessed the attack identified Meena Bhandari in the crowd that evening.
“Politicians made the most of the opportunity that day,” said a businessman who works in the same neighbourhood. “Khan was lucky to have been arrested the previous day. If those in the mob had caught hold of him, they would have killed him.”
Bhandari admitted to being present at the scene but claimed she was there because the police asked her to help control the crowd. “I cried myself hoarse that Khan is in jail but people were angry with him because of his misdeeds,” she said. “What else could I have done? The mob was very aggressive.”
However, footage from a closed-circuit television camera installed outside Chauhan’s beauty parlour shows that Bhandari arrived on the scene well before the mob started its attack.
Bhandari was talking on her phone as the crowd slowly gathered outside the shops. Several people walked up to her and greeted her. At one point, Bhandari is seen raising her clenched fist and the mob around her emulates the gesture.
The video footage ends with one member of the mob pulling down the closed-circuit television camera and breaking it.
Settling old scores
The couple alleged that Meena Bhandari was doing this because of past acrimony with Khan.
“It began in 2018, when she was the councillor,” Khan said. “I did not invite her for the opening of my centre. She later asked how there could be two such centres within a kilometre of each other. But I had a licence from the government of Uttar Pradesh. So she could not stop me from running my business. But she would often threaten me.”
The BJP leader admitted that she had previous runs-in with Khan. In fact, she claimed that she was preparing her own case of alleged financial fraud against him.
“When I was the councillor, I had his centre investigated,” Bhandari said. “I have been after him and his family for a long time because of all their fraud.”
However, Bhandari insisted that her animosity with Khan was separate from the complaint filed by Chauhan’s father. She was helping the Chauhans because she seriously saw it as a case of so-called love jihad and wanted Khan punished for it.
“He trapped her in love when she was 16,” Bhandari said. “He wore a sacred thread around his wrist and put vermillion on his forehead to present himself as a Hindu. In the beginning, the girl did not even know he is Muslim. All of this is proof of love jihad.”
However, the Hindu neighbour of the Khans who had also been arrested by the police, said that Bhandari was acting out of envy. Khan, she explained, had done well for himself and that riled many in the neighbourhood.
Bhandari responded to this by alleging financial wrongdoing against Khan. “He has 32 flats, three Scorpios and two Fortuner cars but where did all this money come from?” she claimed.
The role of the police
Khan spent two weeks in prison before getting bail on June 8. His lawyer said that the case now hinges on Sonika Chauhan’s statement. Khan’s family alleges that the delay in recording the statement allowed the Chauhan family to pressure her.
On June 6, The Indian Express cited neighbours of the family to say that the family had taken Chauhan to Uttarakhand. But when Scroll visited their home in Indirapuram, we found the family there. However, they refused to discuss the case or share any information at all.
The police deny any lapses on their part.
Abhishek Srivastava, Indirapuram’s assistant commissioner of police, dismissed Chauhan’s allegation that her family was holding her captive. “There is no such issue,” he told Scroll on Friday. “Her statement is due to be recorded in court. We will take whatever legal steps we need to take on the basis of her statement.”
In fact, the police argue that rather than being held captive, Sonika Chauhan is not willing to come forward and give a statement.
“My job is to ask her if she is willing to record her statement,” said Sub-Inspector Anuj Kumar, who was initially handling the investigation. “If she is not willing, how can I proceed? In such cases, it is all about the mental state that she is in.”
Kumar also refuted the idea that the police had been acting under pressure from Meena Bhandari. “I don’t work for Meena Bhandari,” he said curtly.
In the rioting and vandalism case, the police are yet to make any arrests. Sub-inspector Rajendra Singh, who is leading that investigation, said he had not come across any political angle so far.
Khan’s side, however, is not buying that the police are acting fairly.
The neighbour who had been arrested along with Khan alleged that the police have acted in a biased manner all along. She argued that the issue could have been resolved on May 25 itself because Chauhan was ready to give her statement right then.
“It looked like the police were afraid of Meena Bhandari,” she said. “If they start doing Hindu-Muslim, they have no right to be here. Just because a crowd gathers, can you forget justice?”
