A conspiracy against inter-faith love
<https://www.thehindu.com/
<https://www.thehindu.com/
NOVEMBER 24, 2020
https://www.thehindu.com/
Laws to curb intermarriages are part of a communal agenda
In India, intermarriages between people of different regions, castes or
religions have to a large extent been prevented by casteism, religious
conservatism, and fear of parental authority. In a country as large and
diverse as this, intermarriages are still a rarity. There are few
inter-caste marriages and even fewer inter-religious ones. Surveys large
and small confirm that the vast majority of Indians (between 95% and 99%
depending on the State) have arranged marriages, which are, by nature,
intra-caste and intra-religious. Between 70% and 80% of Indians across all
age groups and religions disapprove of inter-caste or inter-religious
marriage. Those of us and our forebears who married across caste groups or
across religious communities are a very small minority of around 5% and
about 2%, respectively.
Yet, for decades, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), through its
affiliates, has kept up an attack on the 2%, trying to prevent or break up
marriages between Hindus and people of other faiths, primarily Muslims.
Despite all its very recent protestations to the contrary, the Sangh
Parivar is known to hold that Muslims (and Christians), whose holy sites
are outside India, are not truly “Bharatiya”. Groups owing allegiance to
the Parivar scour court notices for marriages under the Special Marriage
Act and use persuasion, threats, intimidation and even violence to try and
stop marriages from taking place. When Muslim women marry Hindu men (even
abroad), they try to have them “convert” to Hinduism.
Also read: Law on love jihad can be challenged, says U.P. Law Commission
head
<https://www.thehindu.com/
No evidence of ‘love jihad’
But it is only quite recently that they conjured up a conspiracy theory in
support of their campaign. Starting in coastal Karnataka and northern
Kerala in the mid-2000s, Sangh vigilantes claimed that Hindu-Muslim romances
<https://www.thehindu.com/
were
a well-thought-out conspiracy to seduce Hindu women in order to convert
them to Islam and produce Muslim children. It was among these vigilantes
that the term ‘love jihad’ was bandied about. A Karnataka Criminal
Investigation Department (CID) investigation into complaints of ‘love
jihad’ in 2009 concluded that there was no ‘love jihad’
<https://www.thehindu.com/
only love and marriage between consenting adults. But the conspiracy
theory, and the term ‘love jihad’
<https://www.thehindu.com/
were exported to north India in the run-up to the 2014 general election.
Over the next few years, as the Bharatiya Janata Party gained political
ground, the term gained currency, adding another dimension to the Sangh
Parivar’s programme of communal polarisation.
A National Investigation Agency (NIA) probe was ordered following
continuing claims in Kerala in 2018. In Uttar Pradesh, whose current Chief
Minister issued a public death threat to men he claimed were involved in
‘love jihad’, the police investigated 14 complaints. The NIA reached the
same conclusion as the Karnataka CID did in 2009: there was no conspiracy
to convert Hindu women, nothing called ‘love jihad’, all the women
concerned had married and/or changed religions as independent thinking
adults. The U.P. police have found that the majority of the cases probed
were consensual. And in the cases identified as ‘suspicious’ by the police,
neither is there evidence of forcible conversion nor of the fact that the
women did not make their own choices.
But keeping the conspiracy theory alive seems to be an important part of
the RSS-BJP’s communal political programme. And so, under the guise of
anti-conversion laws, a few BJP State governments have now announced their
intention to make ‘love jihad’, a conspiracy theory, a crime punishable by
imprisonment. The conspiracy theory has evolved along the way. Its central
premise is that no Hindu woman will fall in love with a man she knows to be
a Muslim; Muslims disguise themselves as Hindus to get their way with
obedient Hindu women and having ravished them, force them to convert.
Exercising choice
Characterising Hindu women as dim-witted and easily led is socially more
acceptable than the idea that a woman can love outside artificial social
boundaries and exercise choice. This is borne out by the many examples from
across the country of parents using provisions of criminal law on rape and
kidnapping to try and break up their daughter’s relationship or marriage,
entered into by choice. There are also examples from across the country of
families that have conspired to murder their daughter or her husband or
both, because their falling in love is an affront to family authority and
to the social order determined by caste and religion.
The insidious linking of inter-faith relationships with ‘forcible
conversion’, however, gives this campaign a powerful toxicity. The Supreme
Court affirmed in the case of Hadiya (formerly Akhila) and Shafin Jahan
that no one had a right to interfere in the marriage of consenting adults.
What the BJP State governments are proposing is a law that overturns this
premise, by making the validity of a marriage subject to investigation on
the basis of third-party complaints. It makes every Muslim marrying a Hindu
suspect. It characterises Muslims as conspirators in a project of
proselytisation and colonisation of Hindu wombs. And it provides legal
cover for Sangh organisations to carry on their decades-old campaign of
harassment, and worse, against Hindu-Muslim marriages.
To be sure, the RSS and its affiliates have been able to pursue their
flagrantly anti-constitutional and unlawful methods in trying to prevent
inter-religious marriages because their agenda feeds the casteism and
religious anxiety of the majority of Indians. This is why, all these years,
they have had the easy support of court officials, the police, and in too
many cases also the families of young people who have dared to love.
The changes in law proposed by a few BJP State governments, if they go
through, will create a decidedly hostile legal environment for Hindus and
Muslims to marry. What is already difficult, because of family, community
and Sangh Parivar pressures, will become impossibly hard.
Nazi Germany’s Nuremburg laws prohibited sexual relations and marriages
between Jews and non-Jews. Violation of the law led to imprisonment and
later, incarceration in a concentration camp. Segregationist U.S. and
apartheid South Africa had laws prohibiting inter-racial marriages and
sexual relations. In South Africa, the law was enforced through
surveillance and police raids. In both countries, violations were
punishable by imprisonment. In India, the Sangh Parivar can achieve the
same ends without a law explicitly banning such marriages, so long as those
who are unable to see beyond caste and religion conspire in its plan.
|
November 25, 2020
India: A conspiracy against inter-faith love | Anjali Mody (The Hindu, Nov 24, 2020)
