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Love Jihad: Reflections from Diverse HfHR Volunteers

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The new “love jihad” rules in various states in India have been widely reported in the international media.

Here are a few recent articles for anyone who hasn’t kept up with these laws:

We quote from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 16. 

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 18.

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Hindus for Human Rights members are inclusive and progressive Hindus who believe that all humans are connected as one; that God sees no difference between us based on difference of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation; and that a fundamental human right is the right to love.

We asked a few HfHR volunteers to share their thoughts on the new “love jihad” laws in India.

NOTE: The Hindus for Human Rights blog is a space for a healthy exploration of ideas pertinent to our mission. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Hindus for Human Rights.

BRANDON JUHL, Seattle, WA: 

In a blatantly bigoted attempt to prevent inter-faith marriages, BJP politicians in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, and Assam are implementing laws to prevent Hindu women from marrying Muslim men, by calling these marriages “love jihad”, an unhinged conspiracy theory of a covert effort by Muslim men to convert Hindu women through marriage, and in its nascent stage, has already claimed the life of a fetus as a Hindu woman miscarried, while her Muslim husband was tortured in jail in the garb of this law. 

The new law has requirements to hinder interfaith marriages, like informing relatives and posting notices of the impending marriage in public places, which often results in angry, right-wing mobs showing up to stop the marriage with violence or the threat of violence. In a country plagued by the horrors of honor killings, this law subverts the couple’s right to anonymity.

In a clever design to conflate the bigoted conspiracy with human rights concerns, the law carries additional penalties if the wife is under-aged, but child marriages are already illegal under “Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006”. This manipulative conflation is similar to how homophobic right-wing Americans conflate their bigotry with concerns around pedophilia in order to justify homophobia by claiming to “protect the children” from predatory adults. In both cases, bigots claim to be driven by noble reasons to “save” a victimized group, while actively harming an already vulnerable community by labeling them as predators. 

In the U.S, transphobic bigots claim to “protect children” from sexually predatory “men in dresses,” as Islamophobic bigots in India insist to “protect Hindu women and girls” from a communal agenda waged by deceptive Muslim men a.ka. Love Jihaad. This demonization of Muslims reminds us of the racist hysteria in the U.S. around Black men being sexually involved with white women, which led to many lynchings (such as that of Emmett Till) on the flimsy pretext of “protecting white womanhood.”

It was only in the 1960s that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case Loving v. Virginia finally made interracial marriages legal in the U.S. As an outsider (I am a white man born and raised in the U.S.) who was once in an interfaith marriage, this bigoted propaganda in India feels familiar. “Love-jihad” casts Muslim men in the role of the fiendish predatory males and Hindu women as the damsels in distress. This is not just Islamophobic but in my view, quite sexist, misogynist, and condescending towards women.

“Love Jihaad” is analogous to the harm caused by other conspiracy theories rooted in bigotry, such as the centuries-old ridiculous antisemitic blood accusation theory about Jewish people supposedly kidnapping Christians (including children) and killing them and cannibalistically drinking their victims’ blood and/or consuming their flesh or the Islamophobic conspiracy theories that proliferated in the years following 9/11 when various states passed legislation to prevent “sharia law” implementation when no effort for implementation existed. 

VAGISHA AGRAWAL, Calgary, Canada:

At a time when domestic violence in India is on the rise, pre-existing inequalities are deepening during a raging pandemic, and the Indian economy is crumbling before our eyes, the BJP has launched legal attacks on the one thing that brings us all solace: love. Five Indian states have begun implementing laws against interfaith marriages, and other states are preparing to follow suit. Amidst growing inequality in India and historic uprisings of conscientious Indian citizens, Hindu-Nationalists in power have made the fiction of “love-jihad” their biggest concern. BJP IT cells and media channels are working overtime to spread the myth that unions between Muslim men and Hindu women, specifically, are not about love at all, but about cunning Muslim men entrapping foolish Hindu women under the pretense of love to advance their religion. By pitting (inter-faith) love as a kind of national threat and launching an institutionalized war on love, BJP is digging deeper into its fascist roots every day. Only those who romanticize the idea of some sort of pure and superior race can be so threatened by inter-faith or inter-racial unions that they criminalize them altogether!

To those who are truly worried that Hindu women with Muslim boyfriends/husbands are being forced to convert to Islam, I ask this: why would religious coercion in marriages — a form of emotional abuse — demand a special kind of law distinct from other forms of domestic abuse? Given that India’s criminal legal system has been so remarkably futile and ineffective in addressing domestic violence, how and why will it suddenly “protect” Hindu women from emotional abuse? The love-jihad myth is terrifying not only in what it says about the Indian institution of marriage (that Hindu women are infantile creatures being preyed upon by the “other” — Muslim men — who are driven by the sinister agenda of spreading Islam). The love-jihad myth is also terrifying in what it hides about the institution of marriage in India (the grave reality of domestic abuse and the failure of the criminal legal system). Through the love-jihad myth, the hateful, fascistic, and heterosexist ideology of Hindutva not only preserves the cancerous idea that the Hindu race is under threat but also diverts attention from the actual violence of the Indian institution of marriage by framing marriage mostly as a site of the communal battle. At best, “love-jihad” is a dangerous distraction from the various multi-faceted issues gripping our country today. At worst, it is a violent, divisive, and destructive fiction.

The Hindu-nationalist myth of love-jihad reduces two people in love to their religion or race. This reduction in and of itself is a severe form of abuse because it deprives people of the possibility of love. When I was six years old, one time, I refused to play with a Muslim friend because I thought that is what good Hindus were supposed to do. I remember that incident because I’m still so deeply ashamed of it. Sixteen years later, early in January 2020, my friend and I ran into Naeem, a mutual friend of ours, at a gas station around midnight. He invited us over to his place where his roommates had set up a hookah for the night. Naturally, we obliged. That night as we all smoked, joked around, and danced silly, I looked over at our (Pakistani and Muslim) friends saddened by the fact that millions of people in India are deprived of these beautiful moments of love and freedom because all they see when they look across the gas station is some version of the enemy. Soon after that night, Naeem and I dated for a few months. During that time, we dreamed of traveling to India together. But in my version of our dream, I was mostly busy renaming my boyfriend from Muhammed Naeem to some Hindu name because the idea of him being a Pakistani Muslim in India terrified me. I still dream of spending some time in India. But not in one in which to fall in love could potentially be criminal — even fatal.

AMINAH AHMED, Chicago, IL, USA

I am a Muslim Indian American woman and the “love jihad” laws are of grave concern to me. These laws are indeed targeting the Muslim community labeling any marriage between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman one that is done through coercion, without the consent of the Hindu woman. Since it is unclear if the same would not be applicable to a Hindu man marrying a Muslim woman, the argument of neutrality by those who are pushing these laws, those who say these laws do not specifically target members of any religious group, is utterly baseless. The reality is these laws are not neutral and openly target the Muslim community by labeling and painting the love of a Muslim man to be one with a treacherous agenda behind it.

The governing Bharatiya Janata Party’s propaganda of “love jihad” is an unproven conspiracy theory being used to attack and stereotype the Muslim community as well as destroy the harmony and peace between interfaith communities. Moreover, these laws also serve to undermine women’s freedom to determine who they wish to marry without government intervention as per the constitution of India. 

There is no place for these orchestrated efforts to further demonize India’s Muslims in the world’s largest democracy.