What the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) government of Utter Pradesh (UP) – home to India’s largest Muslim population – told us about their anti-conversion law ‘love jihad’ is that it is a fight against Muslims who lure Hindu brides with the aim of conversion, seeking national domination one day.
What they didn’t tell us is that it is a well-thought-out strategy for a slow Muslim genocide to eventually wipe them off the country to purify the ‘Hindu land.’ This is the ideology of BJP – an offshoot of the Hindu extremist party, RSS. It believes that the land of India solely belongs to Hindus, thus all other religious minorities should be eradicated from here. Since coming into power, BJP has sought to give legal backing and authority to its ideological projects.
Several BJP leaders have publically floated the notion on several occasions. To implement the idea, the RSS-inspired BJP government has introduced several laws that make life difficult for minorities, especially Muslims. Revocation of Article 370 and Article 35(a), then the introduction of CAA, NPR, and NRC – all of them subvert Indian Muslims’ right to exist. Love Jihad is just another episode of their anti-Muslim campaign. Now, four more BJP-ruled states have promised to follow the suit.
The False Alarm
Where the BJP claims to see smoke, there is no fire. Interfaith marriages have never been an issue in India for over 70 years because they are a rare occurrence. A 2013 study shows that less than five percent of Indians marry outside their caste, let alone religion. It further states that only two percent of women aged between 15 and 49 had married outside their religions.
Thus, the ‘love jihad’ propaganda is merely a false alarm. It could be because the Hindu nationalists believe in Hindu-domination, they cannot tolerate their women marrying outside religion, especially Muslims, who they conceive as their eternal enemies. Hence, those who dare to go against the tradition must be punished. This is where the anti-conversion comes into play: it allows anyone [read saffron goons] to identify the couples violating the law. Following is an example of how they exploit the opportunity.
A Test Case
Earlier this month, a newly married couple was beaten and forced to a police station by saffron goons when they had arrived at a local court in Moradabad to register their marriage.
The couple insisted that they had married in July, long before the law was enacted, and had only appeared to register their marriage, but all in vain.
Rashid and Muskan Jahan | file photo
The boy, Rashid, and his brother were sent to an unidentified jail while the girl, Muskan (Hindu name Pinky) was kept at a government shelter house for allegedly violating the conversion law.
A week later, Muskan, who was the first female to be arrested under ‘love jihad’, revealed that she had a miscarriage under custody.
“They knew I was pregnant. They still made me work, clean the room, putting a strain on my belly,” said Muskan, who went by Pinky when she was a Hindu.
I knew I was losing my child.
The most recent case was of a couple in Bijnor who was attacked by a saffron activist when they were returning from a birthday party. The two friends, involving a teenage Muslim boy and a Dalit girl were beaten with sticks and taken to a nearby police station where a case was registered against the boy under sections of the SC/ST Act, and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, and is currently in Bijnor jail.
The two were former classmates and now lovers. The police claim that the girl’s father had lodged a complaint against the boy in Dhampur. It states that the accused had “induced the girl to elope with him” with the “intention to marry and convert her.”
However, it turned out to be a gimmick. The girl’s father denied filing the complaint on media. He alleged that the police had dictated the statement to him.
“I trust my daughter completely.”
The Muslim was brutally beaten and jailed for a crime he never committed. His only crime was that dared to love a Hindu girl and wished to marry her.
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