Interviews | Politics | South Asia

Ismat Ara on India’s Crackdown on Love

Ara explains the insidious harm of the “love jihad” myth: “A deeply personal decision, two people deciding to marry, gradually becomes something that others felt entitled to violently police.”

Love and marriage across religious and caste lines have always been frowned upon and forbidden in India. However, Hindu right-wing organizations have taken this to a new extreme by conjuring up a conspiracy theory they term “love jihad.” India is witnessing a systematic strategy being implemented by Hindutva activists to not just prevent Hindu women from marrying Muslim men but to malign the latter by ascribing to them sinister motives of enticing Hindu women with false promises of love and marriage for the sole purpose of converting them to Islam. Bharatiya Janata Party politicians have used the “love jihad” bogey to deepen Hindu anxieties and polarize society. BJP governments in several states have enacted anti-religious conversion laws. Meanwhile, right-wing goons have wreaked enormous havoc in the lives of young couples who dare to love across religious lines.

In her recent book, “Under a Saffron Sky: Inside India’s Crackdown on Love,” author Ismat Ara recounts the enormous stress and suffering that Hindu-Muslim couples experience. She draws attention to how the “love jihad” “myth” has come to “define an entire community.” In an interview with The Diplomat’s South Asia editor, Sudha Ramachandran, Ara pointed out that while an interfaith relationship is a private matter between two people, “within the ‘love jihad’ narrative, the Muslim man is reimagined as part of a larger, organized project to convert Hindu women, increase the Muslim population, and eventually alter the country’s demographic and religious character.”

What is “love jihad”?

“Love jihad” is the idea that Muslim men are deliberately targeting Hindu women for relationships and marriage in order to convert them to Islam, and that this is part of a larger organized conspiracy. It is an elaborate example of political myth-making and what happens when paranoia about “Muslim danger” enters the mass psyche.

While doing fieldwork for my recent book, “Under a Saffron Sky,” what interested me was not only whether individual cases of deception or coercion exist — they can, as they do in any relationship — but how these individual cases are transformed into evidence of a larger, vast conspiracy, one that comes to define an entire community. The leap from “a Muslim man deceiving a woman” to “Muslim men are conducting an organized campaign against Hindu women to take over this country” is the crucial political leap. When it becomes part of a larger conspiracy, the myth then becomes powerful enough to shape families, communities, police action, and even public policy, acquiring a life of its own, with its own set of myths.

There have been cases such as the 2023 Purola episode in Uttarakhand, where an alleged attempt to abduct a 14-year-old girl was quickly branded as “love jihad,” triggering communal protests and the exodus of Muslim families. The case later collapsed in court, with the girl and her uncle contradicting the initial police version. The minor also told the court that police had tutored her to make allegations against the accused, who were subsequently acquitted.

Could you share with us an example of what an interfaith couple undergoes when they are accused of “love jihad”?

Once people believe the myth of “love jihad,” real couples have to live with its consequences. One of the stories I reported from Uttar Pradesh is of a Hindu woman and a Muslim man who got married. After their nikah (wedding), when the couple went to the district magistrate’s office for their marriage registration, the man was shot in the head by two unidentified assailants right outside the government office in broad daylight. The couple wanted to register their marriage, make it official so no harm could touch them. But the woman saw her husband die before her eyes, minutes before that.

What made the story particularly chilling is the context. The couple had received warnings for weeks and months from local right-wing outfits and people opposed to the relationship and believed that once they had an official stamp from the government, no harm could touch their marriage. So, what began as a deeply personal decision, two people deciding to marry, gradually becomes something that others felt entitled to intervene in, threaten, and violently police.

In another example, from Gujarat, a state still scarred by the communal violence of 2002, a stamp vendor who had sold the couple their marriage stamps went on to call the woman’s family to inform them of their daughter’s “misdoings,” escalating the tension further.

In your book, you argue that “love jihad” is all about controlling women. Could you explain how?

One of the book’s main premises is that this is ultimately about controlling women, and that control operates across communities, although in very different ways. When a Hindu woman is told that she cannot choose her own partner because he belongs to another faith, her agency is being taken away. She is often treated as someone who has been deceived or brainwashed rather than as an adult capable of making a decision. But I also looked at Muslim women in the book. There is a case of a Muslim woman whose parents oppose her marriage because the man she has chosen was not just Hindu, but also belonged to a lower caste. The woman was told by her family that they might have considered a Hindu man — but only if he was upper caste. So, the policing of women’s choices isn’t confined to one community.

It’s an old story of women’s choices being made to represent the honor of an entire community, but what is distinctive about the “love jihad” campaign specifically is the way the Hindu woman has increasingly been made into a symbol, used as a tool, almost as the keeper of her entire community’s honor, purity, and demographic future. Her personal choices are seen as a collective threat. She is considered incapable of making her own decision, but in reality, her decision is powerful enough to threaten the demographic future of an entire community.

Article 21 of the Indian Constitution guarantees the right to life and personal liberty, which includes an individual’s freedom to choose whom they wish to marry. In reality, less than 3 percent of marriages in India are actually interfaith, so this has never been an easy choice. It has always meant navigating disapproving parents, nosy neighbors and hostile looks. But increasingly, crossing that boundary can also mean the police coming to your home. These single-digit marriages are framed as “dangerous” or as something that could alter India’s demography.

“Love jihad” is fundamentally a threat-based concept: it brings together anxieties around women, community honor and national security. But what about the real wars being fought by women? The opposite can be opportunity-based concepts, focusing on potential gains, growth, and positive outcomes rather than on “avoiding dangers or risks.” We must look at the basics that affect the majority of our country’s women, from the girl child being killed to girls not getting education or healthcare access.

Could you share with us how right-wing organizations mobilize and prevent interfaith marriages?

The “foot soldiers,” as well as organizations that work around “love jihad” cases, have multiple sources of information and multiple ways of mobilizing. Some maintain strong local networks; others are........

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