Mumbai: Love jihad’s latest shocker occurred last Saturday in Mumbai when a Taxi driver Iqbal Mohammad Sheikh (36) brutally murdered his wife Rupali Chandanshive (20) by slitting her throat for not following Islamic traditions and demanding a divorce. The incident occurred late on Monday night in the Tilak Nagar/Chembur area of Mumbai.

Iqbal Mohammad Sheikh married Rupali Chandanshive after they fell in love three years ago. Rupali had apparently converted and changed her name to Zara for the marriage, which raises questions about the legality of the conversion and marriage as she would probably have been a minor aged ~ 17 at the time. The massive age gap between the two indicates that Rupali was groomed by Sheikh from the time she was clearly a minor, possibly from the age of 14-15.

Rupali’s family said in their complaint that Sheikh and his family used to pressurise her to follow Islamic rituals and wear a burqa from the first day of their marriage. However, Rupali did not agree to it. This often led to altercations between the two and Rupali had left her marital house and was staying separately for the last few months.

The incident occurred at around 10 pm when Iqbal had come to meet Rupali to persuade her to come back as she had already demanded a divorce due to the ongoing dispute.

“They were staying separating for the last few months. However, they used to speak over call and used to quarrel. On Monday, when the couple was speaking over the phone, the woman asked the accused for a divorce but the latter refused. The man then asked for the custody of their son which the woman opposed. This led to an argument between them which led to the murder,” said Rathod.

After quarrelling over the phone last night, Sheikh went to meet Rupali to persuade her to return home. But Rupali was adamant about her decision to divorce. Sheikh then dragged Rupali to a nearby lane and slit her throat and stabbed her hands with a knife leading to her death. He fled the scene after committing the crime.

Upon hearing Rupali’s screams, locals rushed to help her and informed the police about the matter. Police reached the spot and sent her body for post-mortem. Soon after, they launched a manhunt and nabbed the accused. He is being interrogated in connection with the incident.

Such cases show the urgent need for a nationwide anti-conversion law as we have in UP and MP, and to mandate that all inter-faith marriages take place under SMA (Special Marriage Act) only which doesn’t require either party to convert and better safeguards women’s rights. It also shows that talk of increasing the marriage age to 21 is foolhardy given the growing risk of grooming jihadis preying on Hindu teenage girls, and the legal mess that our courts have created by repeatedly upholding sharia law which allows Muslim girls to be married as soon as they hit puberty or turn 15.

Tragically, Rupali becomes yet another addition to a long list of Hindu women who end up dead or severely traumatized for life, after the initial honeymoon period post marrying or being in a relationship with a Muslim man ends and the true Islamist barbarity rears its head – Apoorva Puranik, Anjali Arya, Pratheeksha, Rachna, Priya Chaudhary, Ekta Deswal, Priya Soni, Mahima Vitole, Khushi Parihar and countless unnamed victims like this one from Bulandshahr, or from Gwalior, or from Narsinghpur.

Of course, many of these girls are trapped by Islamists posing as Hindus, and some Muslim men even do faux marriages in Arya Samaj mandirs to fool the victim. Others are led astray by notions of romance and ‘rebelling for love’ that are drip fed to them by Bollywood/Urduwood and mass media. The majority of Hindus, both male and female, don’t even understand the basic difference in personal laws that places a Muslim woman at mercy of her husband and in-laws for divorce, maintenance and child custody.

Those who resist the love/grooming jihadis also run the risk of ending up dead like Ankita Singh, Nikita Tomar, Ritika Sahni, Shivani Khobiyan, Naina Kaur, Priti Mathur, Riya Gautam, Vaishnavi Ingle and others. Even when male family members of the targeted Hindus girls or other members of the public intervene and try to talk sense into the Islamists, these criminals are so emboldened by the apathy of the secular Indian state and judiciary which often releases them on bail or commutes their sentences, that they don’t fear in killing them as well – Dhruv Tyagi, Dharam Sahu, Aditya Tiwari, Raju Rajput being some recent cases.