In September 2025, the quiet town of Deoria in eastern Uttar Pradesh was rocked by revelations that SS Mall, owned by local businessman Usman Ansari Ghani, had been functioning as a hub of sexual exploitation and forced conversions. What began with the complaint of a single Hindu woman soon expanded into a chilling network of systematic targeting, coercion, and blackmail that went on for years.
The complainant, a Hindu woman, revealed how she had been lured with the promise of a job, only to find herself trapped in a web of exploitation. According to her testimony, Usman, his wife Tarannum Jahaan, and his brother-in-law Gauhar Ansari forced her into compromising situations, ripped her clothes, sexually harassed her, and recorded the abuse on video. Those recordings became weapons of blackmail, used to coerce her into silence and to pressurise her into converting to Islam. She recalled how the family told her bluntly that she would not survive in Deoria unless she converted, making the threat of violence and ostracisation explicit.
Her ordeal was not a solitary case. As further testimonies surfaced, a disturbing pattern emerged: Hindu women were being systematically trapped, sexually exploited, blackmailed with videos, and pressured to abandon their faith. The crimes were not random; they followed a deliberate and well-organised method that bore a striking resemblance to earlier conversion rackets exposed in Agra and Bareilly.
How SS mall became the centre of the racket
The heart of the Deoria racket was SS Mall, a shopping complex that symbolised Usman Ansari’s meteoric rise. Locals remembered him as a small-time slipper vendor barely a decade ago, yet today he controlled not one but multiple malls in the district. The source of his wealth became a subject of speculation long before his arrest, with whispers of external funding and shadowy business connections.
Within the mall, employees later testified, two rooms on the upper floors were used as secret chambers where Hindu women were taken under the pretext of office work. Once inside, they were trapped, sexually assaulted, filmed, and blackmailed into submission. The mall’s CCTV system could have exposed the activities, but cashiers and accountants like Ajay and Shah Alam revealed that they were routinely ordered to delete specific footage.
Week after week, footage showing women being led to those rooms was erased on instructions from Usman or his brother Sohail. The deliberate destruction of evidence underscored the premeditated nature of the crimes.
What unfolded inside SS Mall was not only an act of personal depravity but a calculated attempt to use sexual violence as a tool of religious conversion.
Hindu woman’s struggle for justice
The story this Hindu woman reveals not just the brutality of the perpetrators but also the apathy of institutions. For two years, she endured harassment and blackmail. Even after she managed to leave her job, she continued to receive daily threats. The perpetrators told her that unless she withdrew her complaint and accepted conversion, her life in Deoria would be destroyed.
Her repeated visits to the police initially brought no relief. Officials appeared hesitant to act, reportedly due to the financial and political clout of Usman Ansari. It was only after she approached Superintendent of Police and local BJP MLA Shalabh Mani Tripathi that her FIR was registered on September 7, 2025. By then, her trauma had been compounded not only by the abuse itself but by months of being ignored by the very authorities meant to protect her.
The delay in registering her complaint exposed the deep influence that Ansari wielded in Deoria, raising troubling questions about how money and connections can shield organised exploitation networks.
The converted Hindu enforcer
One of the most disturbing elements of the Deoria case was the role of converted Hindus in expanding the network. Among them was Dattatreya Gupta, who converted to Islam in 2019 and assumed the name Abdurrehman. Once converted, he rose to become the manager of EG Mart, another commercial enterprise owned by Usman’s brother. From there, he played a crucial role in pressuring Hindu employees.
Daily Taleem sessions became mandatory, where staff were instructed to recite the Kalma and learn Islamic rituals. His wife, formerly Gayatri Devi and now known as Gulshan Fatima, regularly visited the mall, isolating Hindu girls and initiating them into Islamic practices. This use of converted Hindus as instruments of recruitment mirrors the exact methods seen in other rackets, where converts were weaponised to legitimise and accelerate the conversion process.
The role of Gauhar Ansari and repeat offences
The involvement of Usman’s brother-in-law, Gauhar Ansari, in the racket made it clear that this was a family enterprise rather than the actions of a single individual. Gauhar had already been arrested in August 2025 for kidnapping and converting 19-year-old Lakshmi Singh, who was renamed Salma after her conversion in Delhi. Though brainwashed into initially staying with him, Lakshmi’s father filed a complaint alleging coercion and forced conversion, leading to Gauhar’s arrest.
This prior offence shows that the family was engaged in a pattern of repeated crimes, operating across districts and using the same method of luring Hindu women, brainwashing them, and imposing conversion.
Green uniforms and cultural imposition
A seemingly small but telling detail was that all Hindu women employees at SS Mall were required to wear green uniforms. While green is a common colour, its deep association with Islamic symbolism made this a subtle but powerful method of cultural imposition. By forcing Hindu women to adopt Islamic identifiers in their dress, the perpetrators created an environment of dominance, gradually eroding their Hindu identity. This was not an incidental choice but a deliberate attempt at psychological conditioning.
From Agra to Peer Chhangur to Deoria
What makes the Deoria case particularly disturbing is how closely it resembles earlier rackets. The Agra conversion racket, exposed under Mission Asmita, operated across six states and had clear links to PFI, SDPI, and ISI. It relied on grooming jihad, online radicalisation, and foreign funding through the dark web. Hindu women were radicalised to the extent that some adopted ISIS-style imagery, with one woman even posting a photograph holding an AK-47.
The Chhangur network, uncovered in July 2025, revealed a Rs 500-crore racket incentivised by foreign money. Conversions were graded with payouts depending on caste, with the highest sums offered for Brahmin, Sikh, or Kshatriya women and lower amounts for Dalits. The use of sexual exploitation, blackmail, and coerced conversions was identical to what has now surfaced in Deoria.
The Hizb-ut-Tahrir module added another dimension by showing how radical outfits targeted Hindus for ideological indoctrination, brainwashing them into becoming recruiters. The parallels are unmistakable: exploitation, blackmail, conversion, and expansion of networks using sudden inflows of money.
The money trail and political questions
Usman Ansari’s sudden rise from slipper vendor to mall owner has raised pressing questions about the origins of his wealth. Local MLA Shalabh Mani Tripathi has publicly alleged that his fortune is linked to foreign funding and organised networks operating through the porous Nepal border. Reports by independent portals in 2022 had already documented how border districts near Nepal saw a sudden mushrooming of mosques and madrasas, with over 150 madrasas and 200 mosques in a 15-kilometre stretch. Hindu families were abandoning their homes, leaving behind empty houses marked with Hindu symbols. The fear was palpable, and the demographic shift was undeniable.
Tripathi warned that the Deoria case may be one piece of a much larger puzzle, where foreign money is being funnelled into religious conversion and demographic engineering across Uttar Pradesh. If proven, this would confirm that the exploitation of Hindu women is not merely a criminal racket but part of an orchestrated campaign of demographic warfare.
The weaponisation of institutions
Another alarming dimension was how dissenters were silenced. Employees like Shah Alam, Ajay, and Salman, who dared to question or expose the racket, were framed in fabricated theft cases. Salman in particular alleged that he was extorted of Rs 10 lakh and forced to transfer the money into SS Mall’s account. Such tactics not only punished whistle-blowers but also sent a clear message to others: resistance would be crushed through legal harassment and financial extortion.
The Deoria conversion racket cannot be viewed in isolation. It is part of a recurring pattern that stretches from Agra to Bareilly and now to Deoria. The elements are consistent: sudden financial empires built on dubious money, systematic targeting of Hindu women, use of sexual exploitation as a weapon, conversion through blackmail, converted Hindus turned into enforcers, and institutional apathy that allows the crimes to fester.
The blueprint is clear and deeply troubling. These are not isolated crimes driven by lust or greed alone. They are chapters in an organised conspiracy aimed at weakening Hindu society from within, eroding its cultural and demographic foundations, and replacing them with an aggressive, coercive campaign of religious domination.
The arrest of Usman Ansari and the exposure of the SS Mall racket may bring temporary relief to victims like Sunita, but the larger questions remain unanswered. Where did the money come from? Who provided the foreign funding? How deep are the connections with border-based radical outfits? And most importantly, how many more districts like Deoria are silently suffering similar networks?
Unless these questions are answered through a comprehensive investigation that looks beyond the local and connects the dots across Agra, Peer Chhangur, Deoria, and the Nepal border conspiracy, justice will remain partial. For now, Deoria stands as yet another grim reminder that the fight against organised Hinduphobia is far from over.
Comments