Several highly educated Hindus too subscribe to thistheory of love jihad, as floated by the Hindutva groups.
KOLKATA – "For one Hindu girl a Muslim boy takes away (as his wife), we will take away one hundred Muslims girls," roars the saffron-clad Hindu monk to a hysterically cheering Hindu crowd.
In a video clip which is being widely shared on social networking sites, Yogi Adityanath, a firebrand Hindu leader, who also happens to be a parliamentarian representing India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is seen exhorting Hindu men to counter “love jihad”, by bringing home Muslim girls as their wives.
Adityanath is referring to what Hindu groups have been calling a “Muslim conspiracy to seduce Hindu girls into love-traps” and convert them to Islam.
“Anyone (any Muslim) who wants to become a Hindu is most welcome. We will purify that person according to the Hindu rites and create an entire new class of new Hindus,” Adityanath, who is the head priest of a north Indian Hindu templeGorakhnath Mutt, says in the video.
“We have to launch a massive (Hindu) movement on this line, and no eunuch can be at its helm. We need real men with the physical strength to lead this war.”
Hindu organizations including the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and even many BJP leaders have been alleging that in a bid to increase the population of their community a section of Muslim men have waged love jihad or an organized religious war to entice or force Hindu girls to convert to Islam and marry them.
RSS, VHP and their several offshoots call the Muslim boys “Jihadi Romeos” and charge that they adopt fake Hindu identities to get closer to “naive” Hindu girls,
Hindutva organizations claim that the Muslims, who constitute less than 14% of country’s population, are seeking more Muslim children because they are on a mission to turn India into a Muslim-majority country.
Several highly educated Hindus too subscribe to this theory of love jihad, as floated by the Hindutva groups.
“In this demographic war, Muslim womb has emerged as the most powerful weapon. So, conversion of a non-Muslim woman into Islam simply means the conversion of a non-Muslim womb into a Muslim womb…in a nutshell, the Love- Jihad campaign is an Islamic plan to trap Hindu and non-Muslim girls into fake love, compel them to accept Islam and use them as the instruments forbearing Muslim offspring,” a former Applied Physics professor of the University of Calcutta Dr Radhasyam Brahmachari, who is also known as a Hindu nationalist, wrote in a recent article on a Hindu website.
“The process has two pronged benefits. Firstly, it helps to swell Muslim population fast and secondly, it cripples the population growth of the non-Muslims native population.”
Problem Origins
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| The cover of the latest issue of "Panchjanya"magazine, a mouthpiece of right wing Hindu group RSS, asks: "Is love blind or a business?" |
The term ‘love jihad’ was first coined in the state in 2010, when two adult non-Muslim girls eloped, converted to Islam and married their Muslim boyfriends in Kerala.
The parents of the girls backed by some Hindu vigilante groups alleged that the girls had been forcibly converted to Islam. They also claimed that the girls had fallen prey to an orchestrated conspiracy of love jihad.
Following investigation of the alleged cases of love jihad by Kerala Police, local courts of law observed that the conspiracy charges had been fabricated by the complainants and that the girls had converted to Islam out of their own volition.
Although the police and the judiciary in Kerala trashed the charges of forcible conversion or marriage in any of the two cases, the right wing Hindu groups carried on their campaign to slander the Indian Muslim community in the name of love jihad.
According to the Hindu zealots, the organized demographic aggression or the love jihad is being funded by “some prominent Islamic sources” in the Arab countries and the young Indian Muslim men who successfully woo Hindu girls into their love-traps are being rewarded handsomely by those rich Arab patrons.
In a 2012 article Brahmachari wrote that on his mission of love jihad a Muslim young man got motorbike as a gift and a daily allowance of 200 rupees (US$ 3.3) from one of the Islamic organizations for his “service to Islam” and that Sikh, Jain, Buddhist and tribal girls were also being targeted by the Jihadi Romeos.
Without citing its source the former professor added a chart in the article which said that if a Muslim succeeded to “trap” a Sikh girl in the “fake love affair” he was being offered the highest amount cash reward of 700,000 rupees (US$ 11,600) by an Islamic organization.
For trapping a Hindu Brahmin girl, the booty for a Muslim man was between 500,000 rupees (US$ 8,280) and 600,000 rupees (US$ 9,930), the chart added.
Hate Aggravates
This year as some marriages between Muslim boys and Hindu girls in north Indiawent on the rocks for some reasons, some Hindutva groups picked them up as love jihad cases, using the issue as one of the most potent anti-Muslim weapons in their hands.
In July, in Meerut district of Uttar Pradesh (UP), a Hindu Madrassah teacher alleged that she had been raped by a scholar and his friends, claiming that they tried to convert her to Islam forcibly.
Leaders and activists of VHP and BJP demonstrated angrily and alleged that it was a case of love jihad.
After police investigation, the Hindu teacher admitted that she had eloped with her boyfriend and was not abducted.
Last month, the entire nation was rocked again after a Hindu woman, supported by VHP, claimed that her husband was a Muslim who posed as a Hindu to marry her. After investigation, the police reported that the husband was indeed Hindu.
In past two months, at least six cases of alleged “forced conversions”, involving marriages between Muslims boys and Hindu girls, have propped up across India, setting the communally volatile country on the edge.
Ajay Nandi, a VHP leader in West Bengal said that the six cases were “just tip of the iceberg”.
“Our (Hindu) activists have been able to spot just a few cases in a few pockets. We have to mobilize our activists across the country to locate hundreds or even thousands of other hidden love jihad cases to act against them,” Nandi said in VHP rally near Kolkata last August.
“We have to halt the Muslims on their secret mission to Islamize India.”
There seems a total consensus among all classes of Muslims that the fuss over the alleged cases of ‘love jihad’ is nothing but propaganda by the Hindutva groups with an ulterior motive to vilify, intimidate and malign the Muslim community.
“As Hindu girls are marrying Muslim boys, Muslim girls are too marrying Hindu boys,” member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) and Lucknow’s Shahi Imam Maolana Khalid Rasheed Firangmahali told OnIslam.net.
“In a secular country there is no bar on such marriage. But the Hindutva groups are mischievously dubbing every Hindu-Muslim marriage as a case of love jihad.
“Whenever there is a rift between a Hindu wife and her Muslim husband, these right-wingers give it a communal color and paint the wife as a victim of love-jihad in order to fan anti-Muslim feelings.”
Shahi Imam of Kolkata’s Tipu Sultan Mosque Maolana Nurur Rahman Barkati said no Hindu group was able to prove a single case in which a Muslim force played a role in the conversion or marriage of a Hindu girl to a Muslim boy.
“To convert to a new religion, you have to obtain a prior permission from the administration. It is a very lengthy process which cannot be done in secrecy by putting a gun on someone’s head,” Maolana Barkati told OnIslam.
“Neither conversion nor marriage by force is possible in today’s world of modern communication,” he added.
“The Hindutva groups’ propaganda of love jihad is aimed at polarizing the Hindu majority society on communal lines so that the (Hindu party of) BJP reaps a good political harvest in key state elections in some states.”
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