When a Hindu woman tearfully recently told national media outlets that she had been kidnapped, raped and forcibly converted to Islam, India’s religious hardliners seized the chance to push their fears of a “love jihad.”
Hardline Hindu activists, encouraged by the media attention, said scores of Muslim boys were attempting to abduct, seduce and elope with Hindu girls across the country for the sole purpose of conversion.
On Web sites and in leaflets, right-wing groups warned India’s Hindu majority of the “dangers,” and a senior government minister called for talks between religious leaders “to find a solution to the issue.”
Photo: AFP
Last week, the woman, from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, retracted her claims, saying she had in fact been pressured by her family to concoct the story.
However, Hindu hardliners remain adamant that Muslims, numbering about 150 million in India, have a secret strategy to make the secular country of 1.25 billion their own.
“Of course the girl is being forced to give false statements,” said Vinod Bansal, a spokesman for the radical Vishwa Hindu Parishad outfit, referring to the woman’s retraction.
“Our police systems are so weak that women find it tough to open up on how they are being tortured by Muslim men,” Bansal told reporters, adding that he knew of at least 10 “love jihad” cases in New Delhi alone.
Hindu activists like Bansal have been emboldened since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in May following 10 years of rule by the center-left National Congress party.
Moderate, mainstream Hindus dismiss “love jihad” as a ridiculous conspiracy theory, but experts warn efforts by hardliners to divide India along religious lines risk fueling animosity between its many faiths.
“Some people are trying to polarize the country along communal lines,” political and social commentator Paranjoy Guha Thakurta told reporters.
“It will be most unfortunate if those who are in power and their supporters allow it to happen [because] it is bound to inflame Hindu-Muslim tensions in the country,” he said.
Police said the 20-year-old woman from Uttar Pradesh, the scene of deadly communal violence last year, had eloped with her Muslim lover.
With inter-faith relationships considered taboo in some parts of India, she had originally felt pressured in August to claim rape and conversion. Local politicians seized on the false claims during state by-elections last month in a bid to polarize voters along communal lines, before she finally reversed her story.
“She said she was being threatened by her own family [into making the false claims],” Meerut city police superintendent Onkar Singh said.
The term “love jihad” first gained traction in India in 2009 when Hindu extremist Janajagruti Samiti claimed that 30,000 women in southern Karnataka State had been converted to Islam.
Web sites and literature devoted to the issue claim militant groups are waging “love jihad” worldwide and blame the “fake secularism” of India’s mainstream media for encouraging it.
Young Muslim men “are trained in camps” before being sent to seduce Hindu women, have a Muslim child and gradually finish off Hinduism“once and for all,” one document says.
The disciplinarian, quasi-militant, extreme right-wing outfit, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, whose legions of volunteers mobilized to help Modi win the election and has since grown in prominence, has said it plans to continue to pushing authorities to stop the alleged conversions from happening. The group’s founders say India’s non-Hindus must adopt Hindu culture and religion.
“They must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation,” they said.
Indian Minister of Water Resources and Ganga Rejuvenation Uma Bharti has said communities should hold talks on “love jihad” so they are “not jeopardized in any way.”
However, Modi, who was chief minister of Gujarat state when deadly anti-Muslim riots erupted in 2002, has urged an end to communal tensions and violence, while another minister defused the current issue by saying he did not understand what the term meant.
Muslim Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan, who is married to Hindu actress Kareena Kapoor Khan, won applause for his article in a national newspaper passionately debunking the idea.
“When Kareena and I married, there were similar death threats, with people on the Net saying ridiculous things about love jihad,” he wrote in the Indian Express this month. “Marriage is not jihad. Intermarriage is India. India is a mix.”
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in