A Hindu woman was murdered in India by her Muslim husband for refusing to follow Islamic traditions and demanding a divorce.
The name of the accused is Iqbal Mohammad Sheikh, who is known as a 36-year-old taxi driver in Mumbai. He is charged with murdering Rupali Chandanshive, a 20-year-old Hindu woman, by slitting her throat with a sharp knife and stabbing her hands multiple times for not wearing a burqa per Islamic traditions and demanding a divorce. According to the reports, the incident happened on September 26 in the suburban Tilak Nagar area of west Chembur.
Rupali Chandanshive was already living separately from husband Iqbal Sheikh and was seeking divorce from him. He dragged her out of house and slit her throat on the road. An alarming number of cases of Hindu women doing conversion-nikah are ending up in such brutal murders pic.twitter.com/vcp4tkEjI8
— Swati Goel Sharma (@swati_gs) September 27, 2022
The accused, Iqbal, and the victim Rupali, have been married for three years (since 2019) in a conversion-nikah ceremony. Rupali was renamed Zara after the apparent "conversion." The following year the couple had their first child, Ali. This also calls into question the legality of the marriage since the legal age for women to marry in India is eighteen, and Rupali would have been seventeen at the time.
Since the wedding, Rupali has faced constant pressure from Iqbal and his family to force her to follow Islamic traditions and wear the burqa. Unwilling to discard her dignity, Rupali never listened to her husband's and in-laws' demands, which led to a never-ending cycle of domestic scuffles.
Rupali, exhausted from the quarreling over religious practices, eventually decided to leave her marital house to live separately with her child about six months ago. Quite recently, Rupali moved to a new home close to her parent's house, where she lived with a friend.
According to the Inspector of Tilak Nagar Police Station, Vilas Rathod, the couple had been living separately for the past few months; however, they used to speak over the phone and quarrel. On the day of the murder, after quarreling with his wife on the phone the night before, Iqbal went to Rupali's house. He tried to convince her to return home and change her decision about the divorce, which she declined. The man also tried to persuade her to give him custody of their son, which she also refused.
Infuriated by this, Iqbal then hauled Rupali to a nearby alley, where he slit her throat and stabbed her hands several times with a sharp knife, which led to her death. After committing the crime, he then fled the scene. The locals immediately came to help after hearing the screams and called the police. Shortly after the incident, Iqbal was arrested under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and was taken into police custody for interrogation.
"At around 10 pm on September 26, a man identified as Iqbal Mohammad Sheikh killed his wife by slitting her throat and injuring her hands with a knife. As per the complainant, the accused and his family pressured her to follow Islamic traditions and wear clothes that Muslim women wear. However, a family dispute started after the woman refused to do so," said Vilas Rathod.
