Indian Court rules conversion for marriage invalid

The Court said that the conversion of a person, “without any real belief in the religion to which he/she is converting, was null and void”.

KUALA LUMPUR: Ruling that their conversions were not valid because it was done with “the sole purpose of marriage”, the Allahabad High Court on Tuesday refused to grant any relief to five couples who had got married after the girls who were Hindu converted to Islam, according to a report by the Indian Express which has gone viral on social media.

The couples had approached the Court seeking relief against alleged harassment by relatives and police.

A single-judge bench of Justice Surya Prakash Kesarwani passed the order after clubbing together five petitions from couples hailing from Siddhartha Nagar, Deoria, Kanpur, Sambhal, Pratapgarh and Mau in Uttar Pradesh.

The Court said that the conversion of a person, “without any real belief in the religion to which he/she is converting, was null and void”.

Such a marriage was against the tenets of the Quran and also the rulings of the Supreme Court on the issue, it added.

While dismissing the couples’ pleas, the Court said: “The alleged conversion of petitioner No. 1 (girl) in each of the writ petitions cannot be said to be bona fide or valid. The religion of the petitioner was converted at the instance of petitioner No. 2 (boy) to marry the girl. The petitioner girls have stated that they do not know about Islam.”

In the writ petitions, as well as in the statements on oaths made before this Court, “the petitioner girls have not stated that they have any real faith and belief in the unity of God and Mohammed to be prophet. They all stated that the boy got their religion converted with the sole purpose of marrying her.”

Concluding that these marriages were “against the mandate of… the Holy Quran”, the Court said: “Thus conversion of religion to Islam in the presence of the facts by these girls, without their faith and belief in Islam and at the instance of the boys, solely for the purpose of marriage, cannot be said to be a valid conversion to the Islam religion.”

The petitioners (girls), most of whom were aged around 18 or 19, had earlier submitted before the Court that they “did not know anything about Islam; they were not in the room when their religion was converted; and that they converted only because the boys wanted them to.”

The boys had also submitted before the Court that they were not aware of the paperwork regarding conversion.

But they did admit that they had got the women converted for the sake of marriage.

It was not immediately clear whether the marriages, which the parents and relatives of the girls and apparently police were against, were valid. The Court did not seem to have ruled on the validity of the marriages.