By Md Asif Khan, TwoCircles.net
Recently the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) ruled Indian state of Uttar Pradesh passed the Love Jihad Law. This law is known and pitched as anti-conversion law but it is in essence the Hindutva version of Nuremberg laws passed in Germany during Nazi party’s rule. After the passing of this law in UP, other BJP ruling states are also mulling to bringing the same law.
In 1935, the German chancellor Adolf Hitler had passed the Nuremberg laws to stop marriage between people of Aryan race and the Jews. In Nazi Germany it was illegal for a Jew to marry a German. Today, the Narendra Modi’s Hindu Nationalist Party BJP is following the same Nazi agenda. The BJP govt has passed this law to stop interfaith marriage between Muslims and Hindus.
For last few years Hindutva leaders have been propagating a bogus conspiracy theory of “love Jihad”, spreading propaganda that Muslim men prey on Hindu women, trap them in love and then convert them for marriage, and finally abandon them after a few years. They spread propaganda that Muslims are doing “love Jihad” to increase their population, so that they can outnumber Hindus and can turn India into an Islamic nation.
This conspiracy theory which was started from social media platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter, made its way to TV and newspapers. The mainstream elite Indian Media started debates on the issue push a narrative in favor of Hindutva people. With time, the bogus ‘love Jihad’ became an election issue in India as several BJP leaders started talking about it during election rallies.
As the the ‘love Jihad’ issue became a talking point in the society, the ruling regime passed a bill in the BJP ruled states. Observers say that his bill will be used to target those Muslim men who marry Hindu women. The bill will promote vigilantism in India. The bill has made it a criminal offence for a person to convert another person by coercion, misrepresentation, fraud etc. However, the ground reality is just opposite, as the fear is that this bill will be used in only those cases where a Muslim man marries a a Hindu woman. If a Hindu man is married to a Muslim woman, the law enforcing agencies will not use this law against the Hindu man.
Recently in Moradabad, UP, a Muslim man was arrested because he married a Hindu woman. Few members of the Hindutva outfit Bajrang Dal brought a Hindu girl named Pinki to police station against her will. Pinki kept saying that nobody forced her to marry a Muslim man and that she married with her own will and that she is an adult, but Bajrang Dal members didn’t listen to her. The police arrested her husband and she too was detained.
The widespread fear among the minority Muslim community is that the law has been made to put more Muslims in jail. The Hindutva outfits will target any interfaith marriage where the groom is a Muslim and the bride is Hindu. The law will ensure that police will also interfere in such cases, even though both parties may have give consent to the marriage.
In interfaith marriage, even if couples are adults, their families gave consent to marriage, but if Hindutva people – using this law, call upon police and make an allegation of ‘love Jihad’, then police has the power to stop the marriage and arrest the man.
In essence the law is an attack on personal the freedom of individuals, which is designed to target Muslim men specifically.
Md Asif Khan is a social activist. He tweets at @imMAK02