Love Jihad - A Figment Of Political Imagination; But The Power Of Its Politics Can not Be Underestimated
By Zainab Sikander
23
November, 2020
Love jihad’
is a figment of political imagination, but the power of its politics can’t be
underestimated. You thought Ram Rajya was the foundation stone of the Hindu
Rashtra? Think again. It is actually the bending of Hindu minds around the
ghosts of ‘love jihad’ that will ultimately create the Hindu Rashtra.
Illustration by Ramandeep
Kaur | ThePrint
-----
‘Love
jihad’ is slowly and steadily turning into the carrot that is leading the
donkey towards the formation of a state where politics and religion merge, and
the Hindu Rashtra will finally become a reality. Of course, those with even
basic common sense can foresee that this will spell disaster for India. With
popular acceptance of the concept, legitimised by discussions on television
debates and social media, ‘love jihad’ has turned into a Loch Ness monster that
people are convinced exists but has rarely ever seen, which makes it all the
more dreadful.
Death Of A Secular State
The anatomy
of ‘love jihad’ is fascinating. Since time immemorial, lands have been fought
over, conquered, and won for the pride of a kingdom, community, or tribe. One
piece of land has recently been won in our very own country from the ‘Mughals’
— the Ram Janmabhoomi. Thus, reinstating the pride and honour of Hindus of
India. But there is apparently a new conquest taking place in the 21st century
in Narendra Modi’s New India that most Right-wing Hindus have taken note of.
The conquest of the Muslim man over the Hindu woman. And the man who can’t stop
noticing it is Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
Muslim men
are being accused of running a “foreign funded” jihadist ploy for a while now,
where much like guerrilla warfare, “charming” Muslim men ambush and lure
innocent Hindu women to fall in love with them. These men then, apparently,
smooth talk women into converting to Islam for the sake of ‘love’. This
phenomenon of a Hindu woman marrying a Muslim man has been coined as ‘love
jihad’ — because consensual interfaith marriage can’t be a reality in new
India.
Yogi
Adityanath has openly declared that any Muslim man indulging in ‘love jihad’ will
be inviting death.
His
government, along with the Bharatiya Janata Party governed states of Haryana
and Madhya Pradesh, have decided to enact laws against ‘love jihad’. These are
three states of a secular nation unabashedly endorsing religious diktats. In
Kerala, too, the concept has found support from Catholic bishops, with former
Chief Minister Oommen Chandy claiming that 2,667 young women had converted to
Islam in the state since 2006. Last year, the National Commission for
Minorities vice-chairman George Kurian wrote to Home Minister Amit Shah saying
that Kerala’s Christian community was a ‘soft target’ for Islamic radicals who
were trapping women through ‘love jihad’.
How is this
fear and paranoia any different from the Wahabi policing in Saudi Arabia, where
women are told how to dress, how to behave, or who to be accompanied within a
public place? We are also now dictating who to fall in love with — with state
sanction.
When a
state starts policing its citizens based on religion, it turns from a democracy
to a theocracy. Europe has struggled with this for long. And the very
suggestion of such a law by India’s ruling political party’s state governments
is, in fact, laying the first foundation stone of the Hindu Rashtra, which so
far was only rhetoric — a concept of a Hindu country (as opposed to a secular
one) endorsed by the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in their
gatherings. Now we have the legal basis for it.
A Patriarchal State
The concept
of a Hindu Rashtra, at first, seems simplistic — a country whose official state
religion is Hinduism. But if you were to scratch the surface, the concept has
overtones of patriarchy and a totalitarian state where even someone you marry
has to be approved by the state that is quite clearly being ruled by men.
Let’s
understand the patriarchy. The very concept of ‘love jihad’ is based on the
premise that Hindu women are incapable of thinking for themselves and that
they’re gullible enough to fall for potential ‘terrorists’ who just want to
marry them for the sake of religious conversions. They have no agency or
choice. Often, it is the parents or family of the woman who files complaints
alleging ‘love jihad’. Only because their daughter’s choice goes against
theirs.
Many
Right-wing Hindu men have also reduced Hindu women to just their wombs, because
they claim that Muslims are marrying Hindu women only to produce Muslim
children, thereby pandering to the fake narrative that Muslims are going to
overtake the Hindu population in India. Lesser ‘Hindu wombs’, lesser Hindu
children.
In fact, if
you think that ‘love jihad’ is a modern concept, you’ll be surprised to know
that Right-wing Hindus were stricken by the same paranoia in the 1920s. Back
then, riots took place over the alleged abduction of Hindu women and their
forced conversions to Islam in Kanpur in June 1924 and Mathura in March 1928,
according to history professor Charu Gupta.
And the
story is not very different today. Without any confirmed fact, there is still a
big show of the number of Hindu women who have been “forcefully” converted to
Islam by nefarious and seductive Muslim men masquerading as lovers. In 2009,
pamphlets distributed in Jawaharlal Nehru University claimed that “4,000 girls”
had been converted to Islam under ‘love jihad’ in Delhi and Maharashtra. This
number, whose source is unknown, was circulated by the Akhil Bharatiya
Vidyarthi Parishad or ABVP — the student wing of the RSS.
But there
are new figures of the number of cases of love jihad being put forth in Uttar
Pradesh, with the police actually investigating such cases. And this is how we
understand the manner in which totalitarianism is embedded in the very concept
of the Hindu Rashtra. Under Yogi Adityanath’s very own administration, 14 cases
were being investigated for ‘love jihad’ in August this year. But half of those
cases have been found to be consensual marriages between Hindu women and Muslim
men, and closure reports have been filed for them. The remaining seven cases
are still under investigation. Yet, the myth of love jihad is still considered
real enough for Yogi Adityanath and other chief ministers wanting to enact a
law on it.
------
Zainab Sikander is a
political observer and writer. Views are personal.
Original Headline: Not Ram Mandir, the ‘love
jihad’ laws are the foundation of Hindu Rashtra
Source: The Print
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/love-jihad-figment-political-imagination;/d/123613
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic
Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism