A Muslim man was arrested in Madhya Pradesh’s Indore after his Hindu girlfriend watched the controversial Bollywood film The Kerala Story and filed an FIR against her boyfriend for allegedly raping her on the pretext of marriage and pressuring her to convert, officials said.
According to the police, 23-year-old Faizan was arrested after his girlfriend accused him of rape after “falling into the trap of love under the pretext of marriage.”
Giving details, a senior police official said the duo met at a coaching centre four years ago and fell in love and later started a live-in relationship.
The highly educated woman who works for a private company, had fell in love with the accused, a high-school dropout who studied till class 12 and is unemployed, and alleged that he started mentally harassing her to change her religion which often resulted in arguments between the two.
Talking to reporters, Khajrana police station in-charge Dinesh Verma said that accused has been booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and provisions of the Madhya Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act 2021, which prohibits conversion by force or cheating.
The complainant has alleged that her boyfriend was constantly pressuring her to convert to Islam so that they could get married as per Muslim rituals but when she resisted, he purportedly beat her and raped her on multiple occasions.
However, recently, things came to a breaking point when she persuaded her boyfriend to watch The Kerala Story with her. After watching the film, the couple got into a heated argument and the man allegedly assaulted her, the officer said, adding that the woman filed a complaint at the Khajrana police station on May 19 leading to the arrest of her boyfriend.
Further investigation is underway, he said.
The Kerala Story has sparked a massive controversy since its first trailer—which claimed that 32,000 women from the state were converted to Islam and recruited by global terror group Islamic State— hit the screens in November last year.
