The Herald (Goa)
14 November 2009
Editorial
The Karnataka CID has said it has not found evidence of any ‘Love Jihad’ in a case involving the marriage of a non-Muslim girl from Karnataka with a Kerala Muslim boy. The romance between the two became a cause celebre when the girl’s father, C Selvaraj, complained to the police that his daughter Siljaraj had been tricked by the boy, Asgar, into marriage and later forcibly converted to Islam.
Selvaraj then filed a habeas corpus petition in the High Court. On 21 October, a Division Bench comprising Justice K Sreedhara Rao and Justice Ravi B Mallimath directed the Karnataka and Kerala Police to jointly investigate the alleged ‘Love Jihad’ and submit a report. The court also directed the girl to live with her parents till the police filed the report.
That CID report, submitted yesterday, made it clear that no compulsion was involved in the marriage. It said: “There seems to be no prima facie evidence of ‘Love Jihad’ in the case of Siljaraj of Karnataka’s Chamarajanagar district marrying Asgar of Kannur district of Kerala. Siljaraj has married Asgar out of her own volition.”
However, describing it as an “interim report”, police sought a two-month extension from the High Court to further probe ‘Love Jihad’. The court adjourned the case to 18 January. The Judges said Siljaraj was free to go wherever she wanted, as she is a major.
‘Love Jihad’, said a leading Malayalam newspaper, is a shadowy organisation of Muslim boys whose mission, as ‘love jihadis’, is to convert non-Muslim girls to Islam by feigning love and then marrying them, for the sole purpose of conversion. The paper said that the. ‘love jihadis’ got Rs200 as daily allowance, in addition to a phone, bike and luxurious dress materials. “They are directed to trap the girl in love within two weeks of familiarising (sic). If that was not done, they were to leave the girl and go for some other girls. Once they were in love, the boys should convert and marry them in six months,” it elaborated. Evidence? None...
But despite months of searching, even the Kerala Police have found no evidence of any ‘love jihad’ in the state. Director General of Police (DGP) Jacob Punnoose told the Kerala High Court that the police found no Muslim organisation luring girls of other religious backgrounds to convert them to Islam. However, as with his Karnataka counterparts, the Kerala DGP said he could not come to “a definite all-conclusive finding” owing to a divergence in contents of reports from SPs of different districts. He too, has described his report as an “interim report” and says investigations are still on.
In Kerala, it is not just the Hindu fandamentalists but even the Christians that are raising the ‘Love Jihad’ bogey. “Around 4,000 girls have been subjected to religious conversion since 2005, after they fell in love,” Secretary of the Kerala Catholic Bishops Council’s Commission for Social Harmony and Vigilance Father Johny Kochuparambil wrote in an article in the Church Council’s newsletter, which says 2,868 girls fell into the ‘love jihad’ net between 2006 to 2009. Kochuparambil’s cites “highly reliable sources”, but police have only two cases on record. Notwithstanding, the Kerala Catholic Bishops Council has issued “love jihad” guidelines, calling on parents and schools to monitor children’s activities and discourage them from using mobile phones or spending long hours on the Internet.
Most alarming of all, the Christian organisations seem to be taking the help of the very forces that so recently have launched brutal attacks on Christians all over the country. “Both Hindu and Christian girls are falling prey. So we are cooperating with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) on this,” K S Samson of the Kochi-based Christian Association for Social Action (CASA) has said. This is a path strewn with peril. It will not take more than an instant for the VHP, the Sri Ram Sene and others to turn against the Christians the very stick they are now beating the Muslims with.
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