)
In a recent interview to The Economic Times, Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) President Amit Shah said, “Love Jihad is a media creation, not our terminology. It's a grave social problem.”
So what is it really: A fiction, or a grave social problem? The answer, according to Shah, is “both”.
On the ground, there is little evidence that Muslim men are wooing Hindu women with the express purpose of converting them to Islam. As the senior Superintendent of Police of Saharanpur told my colleague Mayank Mishra, “It is natural and part of the society we live in that there will be some odd inter-community relations among boys and girls. To give it any other colour is unfair."
Further, historian Charu Gupta notes, “There is an increasing anxiety over the increase in inter-religious marriages.” The Hindu right has latched onto this anxiety and turned it into an electoral campaign issue in a particularly communally sensitive region.
Thus, the BJP’s ‘Love Jihad’ campaign in western Uttar Pradesh has turned the possibility, as much as the occurrence, of an inter-religious marriage into a “grave social problem.”
Western UP is particularly fertile ground for such a campaign as it is home to a large number Punjabi Hindus who settled in towns like Saharanpur and Muzzafarnagar in the aftermath of the Partition in 1947.
“The scars of Partition are still visible,” social activist and long-time resident Shandar Ghufran told me, “both for the Hindus and the Muslims.”
In the aftermath of Sikh-Muslim riots in Saharanpur last month, a Punjabi cloth trader spoke to me about a Sikh colleague whose shop was burnt in the riots. “He said, ‘Father’s shop in Lahore was burnt in the partition, and now my shop has been burnt’,” the trader recalled, “It took a long time to convince him to stay in Saharanpur rather than move to Ludhiana.”
A young Muslim man, by contrast, told me how he had been dragged into a property dispute with devastating consequences. “We’ve been friendly with a Hindu family for years,” he said, “but when the brother and sister fell out over the ownership of the house, the brother claimed his sister and I were having an affair.” The local police began an investigation and harassed the family for months.
“But they could never say they were investigating our friendship because that is not a crime,” he said, “So they kept coming up with false charges.”
All charges have now been dropped, but the pressure cost him his job. “I’ve been unemployed for 8 months,” he said, “I’m now looking for a job.”
So Amit Shah is right when he says Love Jihad is both, a fiction and a problem – but not in the way he imagines. The real social problem is the criminalisation of love, friendship and solidarity across religious boundaries.
