Chhangur Baba: The New Faith Merchant

THE YEAR WAS 1981. A small village in the Tenkasi district of Tamil Nadu shocked the nation when 300 Dalit Pallar families, around 800 members in all, converted to Islam in one day. The event, which remains etched into the social history of India, made Meenakshipuram the buzzword for mass conversion of Hindus to Islam. Amid rapidly rising tensions and threats of renewed clashes be­tween Pallars and the dominant Thevar OBCs, the bylanes of the village echoed with slogans raised by Hindu groups prevented by then DC Arumugam from passing by a thatch-roofed, makeshift mosque erected for the newly converted: “Anchu paisa murukku, Arumugam collectora norukku. Pathu paisa murukku, pallivasal norukku (For every five paise snack, Arumugam deserves a whack, for every ten paise snack, the new mosque deserves a whack).” In a state soaked in EV Ramasamy Naicker’s (Periyar) anti-Hin­du political philosophy, the event was viewed by mainstream scholars mainly through the prism of the Periyarite worldview. For decades, Meenakshipuram was synonymous with big-ticket conversion of Hindu congregations to Islam.

That record, however, is no longer held by the southern state. Ut­tar Pradesh (UP), home to the largest number of Muslims among all the states, has begun witnessing a sharp upward trend in its Muslim population for a multiplicity of reasons, including conversion of non-Muslims. In comparison to the almost 16 crore Hindus (79.73 per cent of the total) here, going by Census 2011, 3.85 crore (19.26 per cent) identified as followers of Islam, much higher than the popula­tions of several Islamic nations. It was estimated that by 2024 the populations would be 18.61 crore and 4.70 crore respectively in the state.

Despite sporadic incidents of conversion of Hindus, especially girls, in the state to Islam through marriage or pledges of marriage by Muslim men, it was only in 2020-21 that the Yogi Adityanath government introduced a law against unlawful conversion, commonly referred to as the Love Jihad law. The Uttara Pradesa Vidhivirudha Dharma Samparivartana Pratisedha Adhyadesa is an anti-conversion law that makes religious conversion non-bailable, with up to 10 years of jail time if done through misinfor­mation, unlawfully, by force, or through allurement and other fraudulent means such as entrapment and unkept pledges of marriage. This, the first law to sanction a strict penalty for mass conversion, also demands that an interfaith marriage be approved by the District Marriage Officer.

The law was aimed at protecting unsuspecting and vulnerable Hindu women from being lured into relationships with Muslim men by deceit, leading to their conversion to Islam. An amendment to the ordinance was passed in July 2024, strengthening it, providing harsher penalties, such as life in prison. The legislation was changed to specifically address anyone who threatened, attacked, married, promised to marry, plotted to entrap or traffic women or minors, or anybody else with the objective of converting them. These acts are now classified as serious crimes. Penalties for such offences range from 20 years to life.

In September 2024, a Lucknow sessions court declared 16 men guilty of indulging in mass conversions to Islam, the first such major instance of conviction in UP after the law was passed. The charges were serious, including those of waging war against the state, inciting religious hatred and cheating. In his judgment, Justice Vivekanand Saran Tripathi sentenced 12 accused, in­cluding Maulana Umar Gautam (son of Balraj Singh Gautam) and Mohammed Kaleem Siddiqui (son of Tahir Akhtar), to life imprisonment, while four others were awarded 10 years rigorous imprisonment (RI) each. All the accused were arrested in 2021 when the conversion racket was discovered by the police and Umar Gautam, head of the Islamic Dawah Centre, was nabbed at Batla House, Delhi. The centre reportedly got funds for its ac­tivities from foreign sources, including Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The trial started the next year.

The prosecution said the accused had amassed immense wealth through illegal and forceful mass conversions of Hindus to Islam. Umar Gautam would allegedly narrate to the vulner­able the story of how he, a Thakur, converted to Islam due to discrimination and thus lure them to convert. Over two years, they converted almost 1,000 Hindus. Justice Tripathi described Gautam and Siddiqui as the masterminds of the mass conver­sion case—guilty of working with the “mindset of transforming India into a ‘Dar-ul-Islam’ or ‘House of Islam’ through widespread unlawful conversions.” They were inspired, he said, by “funda­mentalist Jihadi ideology” of the controversial Islamic preacher of Jamaican origin, Bilal Philips, and extremist American Islamic preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who was linked to Al Qaeda.

INTO THIS POTENT mix throw Jamaluddin Shah, once a small-time vendor of prophecies, taweez (amulets), gemstone knock-offs and rings to ward off the evil eye, ploughing on a rickety bicycle through the bylanes of Rehra Mafi village of Utraula area in UP’s Balrampur district, bordering Nepal. Born in 1947, Jamaluddin, also known as Karimullah Khan, used to seek alms before he became village head, between 2005-10 and 2015-20. Physically, he stood at an unassuming 5 ft 7 inches, with gray hair, a lightweight 65kg. Locals say he was soft-spoken. And a very nondescript man. No makings of a man who would head a syndicate, a conversion mafia worth several hundred crores of rupees. He was nicknamed ‘Chhangur’ because he had six fingers on his left hand. It must have proved lucky. In 2015, after he visited the Haji Ali Dargah in Mumbai, and Saudi Arabia, he started call­ing himself Peer Baba. That proved a landmark year. Jamaluddin reinvented himself as Sufi preacher Hazrat Jamaluddin once he gained some political heft. His wife Kutubunnisa also became a panchayat head in 2021. But it was 2015 that turned the tide in his fortunes. It was around that time that he met the couple who became his closest aides in what rapidly grew into an estimated ₹300-plus crore empire of religious conversion, public respect, and real estate. It rang in a flood of funds totalling ₹106-odd crore which was secreted away into 40 separate bank accounts in the names of his family, dozens of NGOs he set up, and some of his 1,500-strong syndicate of youth—a well-knit gang that aided him in his proselytising activities. Most of the money flowed in from Saudi Arabia and other West Asian countries.

The year 2015 was also one that marked his first conversions to Islam. A local, Neetu Rohra, allegedly met Chhangur Baba and asked him to cure her sick daughter which, he told the UP ATS during rigorous interrogation, he had done through faith healing. In 2014, Neetu and her husband Naveen Ganshyam Rohra had made their first trip to the UAE.

Between then and 2019, according to the police, the couple visited Dubai 19 times. Only once during this period did they fly there together but returned separately, raising suspicion among authorities keeping tabs on them. Ironically, Neetu came from a middle-class Sindhi family and was not educated beyond Class VII. In 2015, she converted to Islam and took the name Nasreen. Her husband followed, to become Jalaluddin, and the entire family, including the young daughter renamed Sabiha, converted to Islam in 2021, even submitting documents to authorities in Utraula to confirm this, citing Chhangur Baba as their spiritual guide.

The interpersonal dynamics among the trio must have been electric; this proved to be the beginning of an extravagant lifestyle for all the dramatis personae. The self-styled Baba returned to Rehra Mafi with his aide Neetu alias Nasreen and, after buying land in Balrampur’s Madhapur next to a dargah just three kilo­metres from his village, proceeded to build a lavish residence for himself and his family, including wife Kutubunnisa and son Mehboob and his close aides who were by now inseparable from him. A second property lot sported a 70-room mansion, complete with two dogs and 15 CCTV cameras. That fortress became the fulcrum of his conversion racket, although it was apparently meant to house a hospital first and later, a school.

Neither transpired.

Despite a truncated education, Nasreen proved to be a reposi­tory of native intelligence and street smartness, both qualities that would prove invaluable for Jamaluddin Shah. Ensconced in her new abode, she carved out a pole position for herself in Chhangur Baba’s new mass conversion startup, often initiating contact with vulnerable girls and women, promising to show them the mira­cles that her guru would conjure up and flaunting her affluence. The last stage, once the bait had been taken, would be a face-to-face audience with Chhangur Baba who would put a convincing spin on the virtues, spiritual and material, of taking to Islam.

Naveen aka Jalauddin also played a key role in entrapping poor and vulnerable folks like labourers and those out of luck, luring them with easy loans which, once repayment was reneged upon, would lead to the option of converting to Islam.

The taweez and rings to ward off the evil eye that Chhangur Baba sold once upon a time must have worked at least partially during the ensuing decade since 2015 because the man­sions at Balrampur were not the full roster of properties he accu­mulated. Chhangur Baba also owned real estate in various other places, including in Maharashtra’s hill resort Lonavala, bought in his own name and that of Naveen Rohra, on August 2, 2023. The price of this property was, according to documents, ₹16.49 crore. But the actual price was estimated to be much more. Investigative agencies are now probing the details of the sale and the seller and also the government officials involved.

Balrampur, meanwhile, had turned into a fertile ground for the Baba and his close aides. There were unmissable signs of the Muslim population in regions along the Indo-Nepal border in UP burgeoning and a corresponding uptick in the number of madra­sas. In seven districts of UP, including Balrampur which borders Nepal, around 300 mosques emerged in just four years. The bigger the flock, the more the respect, and Jamaluddin aka Chhangur Baba must have revelled in the fact that his footprints in both his religious and real estate holdings were growing exponentially. In 2022, 1,350 unrecognised madrasas were identified by the au­thorities. By 2023, intelligence inputs revealed Gulf funding to border mosques and madrasas. A three-member SIT reportedly found that 108 madrasas received funds from foreign sources. All that meant a jet-setting lifestyle. Jamaluddin, his aides and members of his network had flown abroad about 50 times over the last few years between them, according to the police. Now, Chhangur Baba’s potential role as a conduit for incoming funds to prop up mosques to serve an increasing number of Muslims in the region is also being probed. Also being investigated are his possible collaborators in Balrampur, including government of­ficials, who facilitated his lifestyle and his illegal activities.

In all, authorities including the Directorate of Enforcement (ED), the UP Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS), and the state STF, who are now doing a deep dive into his moveable and immoveable assets (including luxury cars), pin them roughly at ₹300 plus crore, spread over five states, including UP and Maharashtra. In sheer value and bandwidth, this puts every other mass conversion to Islam racket that came before in the shade. What is astounding also is that this was a well-knit and highly lucrative network that ran successfully over a whole decade, under the very nose of the authorities. Both the ATS and the STF are probing whether the network nurtured by Chhangur Baba has any anti-national or terrorist links.

Chhangur Baba has reportedly precision-targeted 1,500 Hindu women and converted them to Islam in the last decade, besides another 2,000 or so, including Hindu men and folks from other religions. All of that came with a price tag being picked up by his funders, including alleged charitable organisations, some­thing also being probed. “The gang had fixed amounts for con­verting individuals from different castes. The price was capped at ₹15-16 lakh for Brahmins, Sardars, or Kshatriya girls, ₹10-12 lakh for OBC girls, and ₹8-10 lakh for girls from other castes,” according to one ATS officer .The rates were especially higher for conversion of Hindu women from upper castes. ED’s case against Chhangur Baba, registered at its Lucknow unit, is that his earnings have grown suspiciously and inexplicably over the last decade.

Earlier this month, both Neeru aka Nasreen and Chhangur Baba were nabbed from the Star Rooms Hotel in Lucknow’s Vikas Nagar, where they had booked a room initially for four days but extended later to 70 days in order to accommodate their conver­sion exigencies. The police said in a statement that “the poor, help­less labourers, weaker sections, and widowed women were lured with incentives, financial aid, promises of marriage, or forced through intimidation, in violation of established procedures for religious conversion by the accused”. Soon after, the authori­ties bulldozed the Balrampur mansion on the contention that it was built on government land and that 40 rooms of the structure were constructed illegally. On his arrest, Chhangur Baba was sent to seven days ATS custody. Neetu and her husband were also ar­rested. UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, reacting to Jamaluddin Shah’s arrest, said that not only were his activities anti-national but they also sought to tear apart the cohesive fabric of society.

CONVERSION IS MANDATED by Christian and Islamic scripture and through history all methods of conversion were perceived as valid—both non-violent and violent. The zealots banked on verses (Surah 9. Ayats 14) that urge “Fight them! Allah will chastise them at your hands and He will heal the hearts of folk who are Believers.” In (Surah 8, Ayats 65), it is exhorted “O Prophet! Exhort the Believers to fight. If there be of you twenty steadfast, they shall overcome two hundred, and if there be of a hundred steadfast they shall overcome a thousand of those who disbelieve because they (the disbelievers) are a folk without intelligence.” In his book The Calcutta Quran Petition, his­torian Sita Ram Goel cites these preachings of the book, ‘Ayats’ from the Quran, to testify that they command believers to wage war against followers of other faiths. While through history, violence spearheaded jihad or holy war to provoke widespread conversions to Islam on the strength of the sword, non-violent means of conversion were in the form of Dawah—unprovoked invitation to non-Muslims to accept Islam. Other methods in­cluded seduction, kidnapping, marriage, showcasing ‘piety’ via dargahs, sufi fakirs and poetry, cinema, and so on.

Some Islamic scholars quote the Quran to maintain that forced conversion is perceived as hypocrisy and fraudulent, thus rejected by Islam. However, the essence and trajectory of Islamic rule in India prove that conversions were intrinsic to the expansion of their realms. While other pre-Islamic armies who invaded India, such as the Greeks, the Kushans, and the Huns, did not expunge Hindu culture and its symbols, including temples and living tra­ditions, or target Hindu women, Islamic invaders tended to do this aggressively and violently. Goel argues that records of such deeds by Muslim plunderers are found in the documentation maintained by the invaders themselves which declare that all wars of expansion were “Jihad”.

Quoting from the treatise of Amir Timur in 1399 CE, Goel says: “O Prophet, make war upon the infidels and unbelievers, and treat them severely… My great object in invading Hindustan had been to wage a religious war against the infidel Hindus [so that] the army of Islam might gain something by plundering the wealth and valu­ables of the Hindus”. History is witness to the use of coercion by rul­ers in order to convert, the fundamental belief being that Islam (or Christianity at other times) is the only true religion. It is a believer’s fundamental duty, therefore, to convert others to Islam through per­suasion or, that failing, through deceit or force. This was common to all famous Mughal rulers. Goel contends that this was the train of thought that fol­lowed through the reigns of Babur, Akbar (his massacre at Chittor was meant to es­tablish him as the one who vanquished the Kafirs in the name of Islam but he also chose political diplo­macy and marriage with Rajputs to achieve his goal), Jahangir (gave allowances to converts, after violent massacres), and Aurangzeb. TheviolenceperpetratedbyAurangzeb forced the rise of the Sikhs who, under Guru Teg Bahadur in 1675 CE, were tortured and killed for fighting against the forced conversion of Hindus. Many rulers gave only a stark choice: Death, or Islam.

Historians rely on documentary evidence to contend that even the much-romanticised Akbar threatened a hefty jaziya tax on Hindus if they rejected conversion as an option. Will Durant and Koenraad Elst bear testimony to this. Elst, in his Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam has pulled no punches in documenting cases of conversions to Islam among lower-caste Hindus under Mughal rule. Those who complied were rewarded in a variety of ways, including being appointed to high posts and excused from hefty taxes. Elst maintains that between 1000 and 1525, about 80 million people were massacred in the subcontinent.

In the modern, post-Independence context, it is suggested by some historians and sociologists that conversions, both to Islam and Christianity by Hindus, stem from a desire for social and eco­nomic liberation rejecting oppression by the elite under the status quo. There is, though, little proof of this. In parts of South India, casteism is carried into Christianity and Islam and the elite of the former have even shown a preference to intermarry members of their own caste among Hindus rather than Dalit Christians. In its landmark ruling on a case from Tamil Nadu, the Supreme Court rejected as fraudulent the petition from a woman who maintained that she, brought up as a Christian but born of a Christian mother and a Hindu father from the SC community, should be accorded an SC certificate, which she needed mandatorily for securing a gov­ernment job. The apex court saw this as fraudulent, seeking to bar genuine SC candidates from the Hindu community from tak­ing a shot at the job. Despite following the Christian faith where no casteism is ostensibly recognised, and should have paved the way for both social and economic liberation, it proved to be a hollow hypothesis.

Although the phenomenon of Love Jihad came into the lime­light in Kerala in 2009, the Kerala High Court judge giving the ruling in the case, citing police records, said that the phenom­enon as a campaign involving Muslim organisations had started much earlier, in 1996. The late VS Achuthanandan, former chief minister, had called for strict action against the perpetrators of Love Jihad. Another chief minister, Oommen Chandy, told the Assembly in 2012 that of the total number of conversions to Islam (between 2009 and 2012), 2,667 were women from both the Hindu and Christian religions, whereas the number of conversions to those religions were only 81. Despite this, the left-liberals insisted on framing the debate solely in terms of minority victimisation and being in denial about the manipulative, transactional and coercive nature of Love Jihad and mass conversions through al­lurement and entrapment.

Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun Bharati points out that close to 90 per cent of Indian Muslims trace their roots to converts and while they may consider this a blessing today, the brutal facts surrounding the conversion itself cannot be denied. Worse, he maintains, “….the process through which this blessing was obtained is also a fact of history. If the story were to be told, it could severely undermine the basis of identity politics. Communal consciousness is shaped by suppressing memory and obfuscating history.” The consequences of these forced conversions to Islam play out on the modern-day stage in terms of religious radicalisation and separatist politics.

But have the ardent advocates of Islam given up coercive and forced conversion, and if so, why? Ibn Khaldun contends that with the passage of the era of Islamic conquests, the preachers shifted their strategy to Dawah, or mostly non-violent means. But the end result remains the same. Conversions to Islam, more individual now than mass conversions earlier, are no longer only about spiritual or even social and economic liberation. They have become a communal conquest, a game of one-upmanship against the “vanquished” religion of the converted, even as one appar­ently earns a free pass to paradise for fighting the “good war”.

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