On the evening of December 14, 2020, two teenagers* went out on an innocent date in Uttar Pradesh, in India. The 18-year-old Muslim boy and the 16-year-old Hindu girl reportedly “shared a pizza and a few sips of a soft drink, and went for a walk.” (Some reports say that the boy is only 17 years old.)
By the end of the evening, the boy was behind bars, reports ThePrint.in. He was jailed for allegedly trying to elope with the underaged girl and forcibly convert her to Islam.
In November 2020, the state cabinet in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh approved an order criminalizing religious conversions “by marriage” with jail terms of between one and 10 years. As of January 23, the boy was still in prison.
Uttar Pradesh, India’s most-populous state, is where the first new law targeting “love jihad” has been passed. Love jihad is a dog-whistle phrase for what the Hindutva (translated as “Hinduness”) forces allege is a process of Muslim men seducing Hindu women to convert to Islam and marry them. The rise of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party is both the product and a boost to Hindutva, which combines muscular hyper-nationalism and religious, right-wing Hindu conservatism.
Swamped by the pandemic and embittered societal tension in the nature of pogroms and anti-Muslim rhetoric, civil liberties are at an all-time low in India. Love jihad has certainly been used as weapon aimed particularly at the Muslim minority in India. Several Indian states are now considering or enacting laws against love jihad.
Yogi Adityanath (in orange robes) is a hard-line Hindu nationalist monk and a senior member of the ruling BJP. He is chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, where the first law targeting love jihad has been passed.
A tangled web
The period from 2020 till the present is not unique in the media and political obsession over love jihad. The New Yorker even called 2017 “The Year of Love Jihad in India” due to the Hadiya case.
Hadiya, a grown woman from the state of Kerala who was born into a Hindu family, embraced Islam of her own free will. She then chose to marry Shafin, a Muslim man. Their marriage resulted in a court case and a media frenzy.
Hindutva logic characterizes Islam as a fundamentalist and backward religion. State agencies, the courts, the media were all flummoxed by Hadiya’s choices of religion and spouse. They interfered with the private lives of two citizens. They sought to find the reason behind such an act, and the conspiracy theory of love jihad fit best.
Shafin was held responsible for Hadiya’s conversion, even though she had become a Muslim years before their wedding. Other actors — such as Islamic organizations and Hadiya’s Muslim friends — were dragged into the web of legal repercussions and surveillance.
Terror was added to the mix. Humorous posts and comments from Shafin’s Facebook page were introduced in the court as material to prove his connections to ISIS. Even Hadiya’s mental stability was questioned. The court invoked the clause of parens patriae, which allowed the state to act as a guardian of a person who is seen to be mentally incapable, or a minor, or unable to legally act on his or her own behalf.
Hadiya satisfied none of these conditions, but the state intervened anyway. It annulled her legal marriage and released her into the custody of her parents in what was effectively a house arrest. The state allowed the National Investigation Agency, usually called in for questions of sovereignty and terror, to investigate the marriage of two private citizens.
Behind the conspiracy theory of the love jihad is a myth that has been repeatedly debunked. Increasing the population of Muslims forms a major part of the colorful discursive imagination behind Hindu Rashtra. The phrase, which literally means “Hindu Nation,” posits a culturally and religiously homogenous nation-state as a futuristic fantasy within the current geographical boundaries of India.
The Supreme Court later intervened to restore Hadiya’s marriage, set her free, and found that no one had coerced her to become a Muslim. The case marked a historic moment in both the discourse around love jihad and the broader question of anti-conversion sentiment in India and South Asia at large.
Indians are protesting the Citizenship Amendment Bill, which offers amnesty to non-Muslim illegal immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. One analyst has called the exclusionary bill “the most consequential action of the Modi government,” reports the BBC.
An alternative reality
It is important to note that laws to control “forced” conversions already exist in many Indian states and have been used to target the proselytizing efforts of Muslims and Christians. These laws have been in place since the 1960s.
However, bolstered by the current discourse, more specific laws to control love jihad have been introduced in states like Uttar Pradesh. The conspiracy theory has repeatedly reared its ugly head.
Why is there so much anxiety regarding the conversion of Hindu women to Islam to the point of deeming such conversion as “forced”? One possible answer is that the history of love jihad is also the history of the Muslim minority in India. As historian Gyanendra Pandey once asked, the ever-hyphenated identity of an “Indian Muslim” begs the question, ‘Can a Muslim truly be seen as an Indian?’
The discourse of love jihad has to be seen within the stereotype of the eternally disloyal, suspect minority within the bounds of the Indian state. Such a minority is seen as loyal only to its religion or to foreign lands. The complexity of Muslim lives, as well as the immense discrimination that has formed this minority experience, is erased in order to paint an alternative reality of an inherently violent community pouring its energies into violently controlling non-Muslim women’s bodies while also seen as patrolling the women of its own community through orthodoxy.
Three pathways
Author Laura Dudley-Jenkins posits that religious conversion in India, with specific respect to Islam and Christianity, is controlled and criminalized though three major pathways: prosecution, prevention, and persecution.
Dudley-Jenkins is a professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati and the author of “Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Hubert Morken award for best book in religion and politics.
The aspect of prosecution can be seen in the love jihad laws making the headlines. These laws directly criminalize the act of what is described as “forced” conversion.
The aspect of prevention roughly correlates to the disincentives offered by losing affirmative action. The aspect of persecution — such as the rumors of love jihad, terror links, and so on — can be seen in the case of Hadiya or other people who have lost their lives at the hands of mob violence and targeted killings, such as in the case of Graham Staines and his children.
The first pathway is the major aspect which shapes the current laws that have been introduced in states like Uttar Pradesh, while also opening doors to persecution through extra-legal violence. One good example is how the long notice periods that converts have to give to the local administration function as openings for vigilante mobs and local Hindutva activists to intervene in this period, either forcing the convert back to their original faith, or alerting their families and turning them against each other.
The first anti-conversion law in modern India was the Orissa Freedom of Religion Act introduced in 1967. As of March 2021, the state of Gujarat is set to present its own love jihad bill punishing those who convert Hindu women “by misrepresentation, undue influence, coercion, marriage, or any fraudulent means,” said Gujarat Home Minister Pradipsinh Jadeja. The state on the western coast of India has witnessed the worst anti-Muslim pogrom of modern India.
The journey between these two eras is at once vast and yet cyclical. Little has changed, and many of the current movements find their roots in old anxieties and stereotypes about Muslims that have been recycled time and again.
The crossed wires of religion in South Asia have a history much longer than what today’s headlines attempt to encapsulate. In India’s highly polarized society, it remains to be seen what further harm to interfaith couples will result from love jihad laws and whether there will be a spirited resistance to them and their fearmongering. ●
* Names have been withheld to protect the identity of the teenagers.
Firozah Maryam is a PhD research scholar based in India, working at the intersections of law and Islamic movements in South Asia.
