In his eight years in power, Modi has been widely successful in his promotion of a Hindu nationalist agenda, threatening the secular fabric of the nation. His party’s blatant and open expression of Islamophobia is extremely alarming.

“There is [definitely]anti-Muslim sentiment from the BJP, there has to be,” claimed Mohit Roy, a local BJP leader. “We are seeing the demographic and cultural infiltration of Muslims in India. If I was to say I don’t have [anti-Muslim sentiment], I would be lying.”

Mohit Roy’s statements are deeply troubling and indicative of where Muslims in India stand: as scapegoats for the country’s troubles. The prime minister and his party exploit anxieties related to the perceived Muslim takeover of the Hindu population, facilitated through acts like ‘love jihad,’ to advance their agenda.

‘Love jihad,’ a term coined by the political and religious right, describes a phenomenon in which Muslim men forcefully convert and marry Hindu women. Nationalist groups claim that these conversions have become a tool utilized by Muslims to alter the demographics of the country and to establish an Islamic state. 

Kolkata native Shan Ghoshal owns ProjectHinduKush, a website that propagates the idea of an ongoing genocide of Hindus both in India and overseas. He considers involuntary religious conversions to be one of the most widespread instances of violence in the nation.

According to individuals like Shan Ghoshal, monetary incentives are provided by religious leaders in the Muslim community to their adherents who successfully commit acts of ‘love jihad.’  

“There’s a price tag for it,” said Ghoshal, explaining the motives behind ‘love jihad.’ “The cash reward is better for victims of higher caste and [Muslims] believe that if they convert Hindu women, they’ll go to heaven.” 

However, despite assertions like these, India’s National Investigation Agency has found no proof to support the existence of such a phenomenon. The Minister of State for Home Affairs, G. Krishna Reddy, told the Parliament in February 2020 that “no case of ‘love jihad’ has been reported by any of the central agencies.” 

Furthermore, documents provided in response to an Rights to Information request by Article 14 show that the Kerala Police too found no evidence of ‘love jihad’ when asked to investigate complaints by the National Commission for Minorities. 

According to police, sporadic cases of deceitful behavior by unscrupulous men are not evidence of a broader conspiracy or a larger plot. It seems that accounts of ‘love jihad’ are merely misrepresentations of regular consensual relationships.

For example, Muskan, a 22-year-old who was born into a Hindu family, and her Muslim husband Rashid went to register their marriage in the Uttar Pradesh town of Moradabad in December 2021. 

Her husband was accused of violating the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance, better known as the ‘love jihad’ law that outlaws conversions and calls into question inter-religious marriages. He was subsequently thrown in jail and the young woman was put in a state-run shelter home. 

“In most cases we found that a Hindu girl and Muslim boy were in love and had married against their parents’ will,” said state police chief A.L. Banerjee. “These are cases of love marriages and not ‘love jihad.’”

Even though there is substantial evidence refuting the existence of ‘love jihad,’ this “fringe extremist theory” has been brought into the political mainstream by far-right Hindutva groups in India. 

‘Love jihad’ is an example of disinformation slowly and steadily spreading hate against Muslims, tainting the Hindu majority’s perceptions. Anti-Muslim disinformation is persuasive, especially for anyone seeking confirmation of their hatred and deep-seated prejudice. 

The implementation of these laws encroaches upon an individual’s freedom of religion and right to interreligious marriage. It serves as a blatant example of government overreach driven by the administration’s prejudices and animosity towards a marginalized population. This law is motivated by the notion that through conversions, Muslims will gradually overpower the Hindu population in India.

However, the plausibility of this occurring is unclear, as Hindus have consistently accounted for 85% of the population over the past 40 years. The BJP under Modi’s leadership has cultivated a deep sense of Hindu victimhood by taking advantage of apprehensions surrounding ‘love jihad’ and the growing presence of Muslims in the nation.  

The propagation of baseless beliefs and unfounded fears by Hindu nationalist organizations reduces any likelihood of peaceful coexistence between the two faiths. 

But perhaps that’s the point. That there is no desire or intent to coexist. 

“[Hindus and Muslims] have been trying for 1,400 years and it hasn’t worked,” said Ghoshal. “India becoming a Hindu Rashtra guarantees peace for everyone and the right to practice religion [as one]sees it.”

This raises concerns about the fate of the more than 172 million Muslims currently residing in India and their ability to freely exercise their religion. Due to accusations of ‘love jihad’ and the fabricated fear of Muslims overpowering the Hindu population, Muslims are encountering significant challenges.

Since the Modi government came into power, there has been a significant surge in hate crimes motivated by religion, measured by an overall increase of 30%. The situation is even more alarming when observing that Muslims have been the main target in over 78% of these incidents, according to India Spend Initiative’s Hate Crime Tracker. 

Although the Indian Constitution enshrines principles of secularism and religious freedom, it seems that they are not being implemented fairly in the case of the Muslim population. 

But singing to the tune of the BJP, Shane Ghoshal explains that the current government’s actions are very much intentional and thought through. 

“A state can never be secular. In the preamble of our constitution, the secular word was added in a non-democratic manner by [previous prime minister]Indira Gandhi. It was a dark day for Indian democracy,” says Ghoshal. “Secularism just isn’t the flavor of India.” 

Shan Ghoshal’s perspective on the subject sheds light on the delicate state of India’s secular fabric. In the face of rising Islamophobia and divisive narratives like ‘love jihad,’ the future of religious freedom and co-existence in the nation hangs in the balance. 

The post Unraveling Secularism: The Rise of Islamophobia and ‘Love Jihad’ in Modi’s India appeared first on Glimpse from the Globe.

Muskan and Rashid’s story is only one that represents the numerous and widespread challenges interfaith couples are facing in India. These couples have faced targeted persecution by Indian authorities under the new anti-conversion laws instituted across the country. The new laws are being publicized to halt “Love Jihad,” a term coined by Hindu nationalist factions to imply that Muslim men trick Hindu women into marriage for the sole purpose of converting them to Islam.

In India, marriage is a social process and practice, the boundaries of which are often defined by customs, traditions and even prejudices. Marriages within the Hindu community itself are primarily performed within caste groups, with only 11% of marriages per year being inter-caste marriages. The stigma is further heightened for interfaith marriages, making them even more of a rarity in the Indian social fabric, with only 2.1% of women who marry outside their faith. 

State legislatures have historically passed laws to regulate religious conversions, and currently, nine states have provisions regulating religious conversions to varying degrees. Even though lawmakers from the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claim that the laws are not meant to target any specific religious communities, the majority of the cases registered under the law in states like Uttar Pradesh have been against Muslim men. 

The Love Jihad conspiracy and the resulting anti-conversion laws seem to be just another additive to the ruling party’s ongoing conquest to further marginalize India’s 200 million Muslims through various legal measures. The passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which provides citizenship to only non-Muslim refugees from neighboring countries, along with the government’s strict criminalization of the Muslim “Triple Talaq” divorces, has left little to the imagination when it comes to the ideological standing of the ruling party.

“This law will prevent innocent girls being forcefully converted on the pretext of marriage,” said Narottam Mishra, the home minister in BJP-ruled central state of Madhya Pradesh. Prime Minister Modi, meanwhile, has mostly remained silent on the issue and the Central Government has said it has no plans on drawing up federal legislation on the matter, and will leave it up to the states. 

The Love Jihad conspiracy is not the creation of the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor his party, the BJP. Rather, it is the culmination of the continuous stereotyping of Muslim men as “predatory” since India’s colonial days. In 1924, a Muslim bureaucrat from Cawnpore (now Kanpur) was accused of “abducting and seducing” a Hindu woman and forcibly converting her to Islam. The idea later gained political relevance in the late 2000s when it was taken up by fringe Hindu-right groups in southern India, eventually leading to quasi-legitimizing orders by state courts that ordered probes and annulled interfaith marriages. Later, it was used by the BJP to stir up communal tensions and cause riots in other parts of the country for electoral gains. 

The Love Jihad conspiracy has proven to be wildly successful talking for the BJP, triggering all the right politically-conducive anxieties — a majoritarian pseudo-victimhood in the secular republic, patriarchal insecurities in an increasingly modernizing India and blatant Islamophobia that unites Hindu nationalist sympathizers like no other factor.

On January 6, 2021, The Supreme Court of India refused to stay the enactment of the latest anti-conversion laws in states across the country, thus indirectly giving green lights to laws resembling the one that was used to arrest Rashid and Muskan. Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, implemented a law called “the Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion” causing much uproar as it established a set jail term of ten years for a marriage conducted for the sole purpose of religious conversion. 

However, the onus of determining the “validity of a union” has been placed on the same authorities and police who already harass and intimidate interfaith couples who seek to marry. India does not have a uniform civil code due to the diverse array of historical customs and traditions of different communities. As a result, couples must register their marriages through laws that govern personal relationships and disputes of their specific communities. 

Interfaith couples, meanwhile, have used the Special Marriages Act of 1954 that requires verification from local authorities, a waiting period of thirty days, and mandates the publication of their intent to wed in a newspaper in case objections might arise. The law also vests the authorities with the power to investigate any complaint against the couple, which puts interfaith couples in a precarious position as most of them seek to get married without parental consent or knowledge.

As much as the Love Jihad conspiracy is about the broader project of Hindu nationalism and the implicit strokes of Islamophobia it contains, it is also about policing women’s sexuality and choices. Marriages of choice are extremely rare in India (only 4%) as the concept of arranged marriage, parents’ choosing brides and grooms for their children, reigns supreme. The practice of picking spouses might come off as just conserving familial customs of elderly respect, but it is equally about preserving puritanical standards of caste, class and religion. Now, the Indian state is willing to police love that does not measure up to those puritanical parameters.

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