War on love

Marriage is a matter of personal liberty and bringing a law to curb it in any manner is completely unconstitutional

Inter-faith marriages are meant to be celebrated, not to be turned into a communal narrative to target the minority communities. In the midst of a highly polarised and hateful debate over what is being dubbed as ‘love jihad’, the Uttar Pradesh government has come out with an ordinance ostensibly aimed at curbing forcible or fraudulent conversions, including those for the sake of tying the knot. Marriage is primarily a social and legal institution rather than a religious one. Unleashing the law on an interfaith couple that duly completes the formalities for registration of marriage reeks of prejudice and vendetta. The fact that the governments of some other BJP-ruled States are preparing to jump on the anti-conversion bandwagon has fuelled speculation that the common objective is to demonise a community and criminalise conversion even by choice. Such draconian provisions are eventually an assault on the Constitution, which equally entitles all citizens to freely practise any religion. And love is meant to be celebrated, not sacrificed at the altar of religion. Love jihad is a derisive slur manufactured by the right-wing elements to divide the nation and disturb communal harmony. Marriage is entirely a matter of personal liberty and bringing a law to curb it in any manner is completely unconstitutional. The Uttar Pradesh law, with a jail term up to ten years, puts the onus on the accused and the convert to prove that the conversion has not been done forcibly and they will be considered ‘guilty until proven innocent’. This will amount to striking at the roots of personal liberty and individual choice.

There has been no clinching evidence in cases involving allegations that Muslim men were out to convert Hindu women to Islam on the pretext of marriage. As a result, the love jihad narrative has largely remained a figment of a paranoid imagination. In 2009, the Kerala High Court had directed the state police chief to find out whether there was any organised movement to convert Christian and Hindu girls to Islam by dangling the marital bait. The probe found no conclusive proof to establish the existence of such a movement or the veracity of the allegations. A probe by a national investigating agency in 2018 examined 11 interfaith marriages in Kerala and found no proof of coercion. In October, the jewellery brand Tanishq was forced to withdraw an advertisement built around interreligious harmony at a baby shower ceremony. It evoked a furious response from some Hindu nationalists, who threatened to boycott the brand for promoting love jihad. Despite the absence of evidence for the phenomenon of love jihad, three more BJP-ruled States — Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Karnataka — have pledged to enact laws targeting it.

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