LOVE JIHAD ?

It has happened again, within a span of just two months. After the arrest of students and professors of SPPU’s Lalit Kala Kendra for staging an ironic play that “hurt religious sentiments,” news comes of a Muslim student being assaulted on the university campus for practicing ‘Love Jihad’. All he was doing was walking towards his department with three friends, one male and two female. Apparently, the student was also told to quit studies. This would ensure that what little diversity is left on the SPPU campus from its halcyon days in the 1980s and 1990s, and the first decade of the 21st century, will automatically vanish. We’ll no longer see foreigners, religious minorities, sexual minorities, and so on, rubbing shoulders with their majoritarian brethren. Xenophobia, Islamophobia and homophobia will all have a field day.

Love Jihad is a law that currently has locus standi only in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Haryana, all BJP-ruled states. However, after he became Deputy Chief Minister, Devendra Fadnavis spoke of his government’s intention to introduce the law in Maharashtra as well.  That the thugs who beat up the unfortunate student invoked Love Jihad proves that Maharashtra is all geared up to introduce the discriminatory law after elections. The state, after all, has the second largest number of MPs, after Uttar Pradesh. The game plan seems to be to introduce the law in the larger states first, and then let it trickle down to the smaller states, till it engulfs the whole country.

Yet, the Supreme Court has ruled that “Constitutionally, no Indian citizen can be prevented from exercising her/his matrimonial choice. Since the framers of the Constitution did not foresee a situation of inter-faith marriages being objected to…there is no specific clause dealing with it.”

In keeping with its view, the Supreme Court thus reversed a judgment in favour of Love Jihad given by two high courts, the Kerala High Court in 2018, and the Gujarat High Court in 2021.

Actually, as one of the framers of the Constitution, B. R. Ambedkar in his essay “Annihilation of Caste” advocates inter-caste marriage, but points out that inter-caste marriage isn’t sufficient to annihilate the caste system. The real solution, according to him, is to destroy the religious notions upon which caste is founded. Ambedkar himself, it will be recalled, converted to Buddhism. If a low-caste Hindu woman converts to any other religion, including Islam, out of choice, it can be seen as liberation from the fixity of caste. Not to allow her to convert by invoking laws like Love Jihad, is really to keep her in the throes of caste. Ironically, it was Uttar Pradesh that had an interfaith marriage scheme to create communal harmony, introduced by the Congress in 1976, during the Emergency. According to the scheme, couples who married outside their religion were given financial incentives.

It can be argued, then, that inter-faith marriages are a means to destroy the religious notions of caste. If one accepts this view, the implications of Love Jihad run counter to what both Dr Ambedkar and the Supreme Court have said. Moreover, Jihad being an Islamic concept, the law disallowing inter-faith marriages, like the Citizenship Amendment Act, only targets Muslims. It is silent about inter-faith marriages involving other religions.

A former student of mine who is now a political activist with the Congress tells me that when he questioned the men who disrupted the Lalit Kala Kendra performance, they retorted that they had received orders to do so “from above.” In other words, from Big Brother. It goes without saying, then, that this time too, the orders to prowl about on campus to look for ‘Love Jihad’ victims would have come From Above. As the general elections near, it seems to me that the culprits are so sure of a third term for their party that they feel that nothing can stop them from taking the law into their own hands.

But if such unconstitutional orders are indeed given by Big Brother, can we really expect our universities and the cops to take action against the offenders? After all, the appointments of vice-chancellors and police commissioners are in the hands of the government. In the not-so-distant past, did the then VC of M S University, Baroda, take action against the rogues who disrupted and vandalized Fine Arts dean Shivaji Pannikar’s student exhibition, which led to his permanent suspension? Did the Gujarat University VC take action against the goons who attacked foreign students offering namaz during Ramadan last month? Did SPPU arrest the men who disrupted the Lalit Kala Kendra student performance, instead of arresting the students themselves? Likewise, did Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce arrest the guys who stormed into the college to protest against a comment made by a professor? Or did they arrest the professor himself? The list is endless. Erudite faculty members have been suspended even by seemingly liberal private universities, like Ashoka University, for their research; and by institutions like Un-Academy, for their comments; all of which were unpalatable to the ruling dispensation.

In the present case, too, we can be sure that all talk of examining the CCTV footage and applying relevant sections, and of forming fact-finding committees, will ultimately come to nought. The offenders, we can be sure, will go scot-free. As such, the Additional Commissioner of Police, Pune, has been quoted by a leading newspaper as saying, “We won’t arrest them [the culprits], as the sections relate to non-bailable offences.”

Sadly, it is the victims who have to live in fear. The father of the assaulted SPPU student has reportedly said: “I started shaking in fear when I got the call [about my son’s assault]. I pleaded with them [the culprits] not to harm my boy. I told them he was their brother. How can they beat up a student over religion? We are scared for his life…We are taking him home for a week, so that he settles down a bit.”

R. Raj Rao is a writer and former head of the English department at Savitribai Phule Pune University.