Numerous cases of Love Jihad have surfaced over the years, each telling a unique story of horror and disbelief. Women have been deceived into falling in “love”, in many cases by men who courted them under the guise of being a Hindu man, concealing their real religious identity. These men are not just regular men who have fallen in love with a woman from another community; they are Islamists who have religious expansion rooted in their minds.
While mainstream media makes special efforts to push these cases under the rug or dismisses them as regular crimes, our law & order machinery goes an extra mile to deny the vicious motive of ‘Love Jihad’ in the name of secularism and universal love.
In January 2019, the apex court held that the marriage of a Muslim man to a Hindu woman who had not converted to Islam at the time of marriage is an ‘irregular’ marriage as per Muslim law regarding marriage of a Muslim man with Muslim man with an ‘idolater or fire worshiper’. In such cases, the wife, though entitled to the dower, is not eligible to inherit the husband’s property, the court ruled.
Such judgments by courts should set off loud warning bells for any non-Muslim woman contemplating a relationship with a Muslim man. Unless the woman is mature and aware enough to get married under the Special Marriage Act, a non-Muslim woman who gets married under Muslim law to a Muslim man for the sake of ‘love’ and believes that she can continue following her original faith and culture after marriage, is putting her future at grave risk. In this particular case, even the child born out of such a wedding had to fight a legal battle to get inheritance rights to the property left behind by his deceased father.
In another case, a Muslim man in Chattisgarh, established a relationship with a Hindu woman and ‘converted’ to Hindu Dharma to marry the woman he claimed to love. But right after the marriage, the man returned to the fold of Islam. Disgruntled parents of the girl moved court claiming the marriage was a pure sham. The 24-year-old girl expressed her willingness to live with the ‘husband.’ The Supreme Court merely asked the man to file an affidavit to prove his bonafides while passing homilies like ‘we are not averse to this kind of living together. We are all for inter-faith and inter-caste marriages….he must be a loyal husband and not only a great lover.‘
It doesn’t take comprehension level of a rocket scientist to see that the man certainly had dubious motives behind the marriage; had it been love or a honest relationship, he wouldn’t have first converted to Hindu Dharma and then returned to Islam right after the marriage. But in the eyes of law, there is nothing suspicious or illegal about it. The mental state of women & parents who find themselves trapped in such situations is obvious, but not to our secular judiciary who are pre-occupied with grandstanding their liberal worldview.
Though we get to read about such cases more these days, Love Jihad has deeper and older roots and girls from Hindu community have always been susceptive to the lure. With large number of such cases coming from the state of Kerala, the Kerala High Court in 2009, quoted statistics and observed that there were about 3000 to 4000 such cases of forced conversions in the previous 4 years.
DGP Jacob Punnoose, who was responsible for the investigations, held that there was no such organized attempt by any organization that intended to lure girls into conversion by feigning love. But Justice KT Sankaran refused to accept the claims made in Punnoose’s report and stated that there were many such cases which were recorded in a case diary and could be produced to indicate that there are “concerted effort” to convert girls with “blessings of some outfits”. And with Islamic conversion centres (aka study centres) like PFI-linked ‘Sathya Sarani‘ in Manjeri, Malappuram now coming to the fore, no sane person can deny the existence of an organized racket to convert non-Muslim girls in Kerala.
In 2009, the Karnataka High Court asked the state CID to probe allegations of Love Jihad. The CID claimed there was no ‘organised attempt’ to entice Hindu or Christian girls to marry Muslims and convert to Islam. The case was closed in 2013 after the Congress came to power in the state with the government’s advocate in the high court stating “there are no cases of love jihad.”
For the record, Love Jihadists also target Christians. Hence, the community that has always been hand in glove with their fellow ‘minority’ to keep Hindus on the defensive, ironically has their leaders turn towards the BJP-led central Government to counter the Love Jihad menace. Minority Commission Vice-Chairman George Kurian recently reached out to HM Amit Shah requesting an NIA probe in cases where Christian girls were lured and duped by Islamists and even supplied to terror outfits like Islamic State.
In his letter dated September 23rd, George Kurian states, “The spate of organized religious conversions and using the victims for terror activities by trapping them through ‘love jihad’ has shown that the Christian community is a soft target for Islamic radicals.” Not surprisingly, Kurian’s appeal was met with deafening silence by the Lutyens’ liberals who are otherwise quick to outrage over any comment by a Christian leader.
We have seen an alarming number of women from Hindu, Christian, tribal and other communities being seduced by men from a particular “minority”, who, even before marriage, propose the idea of a religious conversion and viciously indoctrinate their minds into believing in it. This clearly doesn’t look like an emotion but a behavioral pattern adopted with a larger picture in mind. The Government should initiate a thorough investigation into such cases without any further delay and institutions adulating the idea of secularism should stop living in denial. The elephant in the room is too massive to overlook.
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