The Governments of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Karnataka are considering legislations against the so-called “love jihad” to prevent an alleged campaign of Muslims forcing Hindu girls to convert in the guise of love. Such law is dangerous, especially without any empirical data establishing such a trend, and is mostly based on paranoia about inter-personal relationship between two individuals, which has no place within our Constitutional setup.
The Cconstitution on the contrary allows every citizen to have the freedom to marry any person he or she chooses and the freedom to follow faith of one’s choice. The state has no authority to go on policing these individual choices and preferences.
Interestingly, in February this year, the Union Home Ministry had informed Parliament that there was nothing called “love jihad” in the country and that the Constitution has given freedom to practise and propagate any religion. However, there is a prolonged and consistent rightwing campaign over the years now which believes that there is a conspiracy to use Muslim men to lure and convert Hindu women to Islam. And this has been used to disapprove of and de-legitimise inter-faith love and marriages, which has little relevance in reality.
All attempts to propagate such toxic prejudices and mould those into law are a disservice to the Constitution and the state as a whole. Such agendas are destined to be anti-development as the States shall be heavily burdened by suspicion of inter-community relations which is conducive to neither capital nor talent nor for the exchange of ideas. The UP Government, whose credibility in containing atrocities against women is pathetic, has been trying to bring the regressive law as Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said for “the respect of our sisters” which is unbelievable.
The Haryana CM has been determined to bring the law following to the murder of a 20-year-old young woman by a former classmate, who was allegedly forcing her to convert to Islam. But the fact is there are enough laws to contain proselytisation or tackle coercive conversion at the State level like the Freedom of Religion Act.
Laws restricting and controlling religious conversions were first introduced by Hindu princely states during the pre-Independence era in the late 1930s. Such laws were enacted to preserve Hindu religious identity from the efforts of conversion made by British missionaries.
The princely states of Kota, Bikaner, Jodhpur, Raigarh, Patna, Surguja, Udaipur and Kalahandi had such laws, to name a few of them were Raigarh State Conversion Act, 1936; the Surguja State Apostasy Act, 1942; and the Udaipur State Anti-Conversion Act, 1946.
After India’s independence, a number of such laws were introduced in the Parliament, but none could make way till being enacted.
Like the Indian Conversion (Regulation and Registration) Bill was introduced in 1954, which meant to enforce ‘licensing of missionaries and the registration of conversion with government officials’; the ‘Backward Communities (Religious Protection) Bill’ of 1960, intended to ‘check conversion of Hindus to ‘non-Indian religions’ and the Freedom of Religion Bill in 1979, which intended to put “official curbs on inter-religious conversion.” However, none of them could see light of the day because of lack of parliamentary consensus over the issue.
Something which was not fitting enough in the eyes of the lawmakers of the yesteryears is being attempted to be enacted in the form of a law for prohibition of ‘love jihad’ by some State Governments in a more stringent and regressive form. The strange narrative that is being proposed in support of such a law is that Hindu women are gullible victims as they have been persuaded and are being persuaded to get distracted from their community or religious fold and that this law will be a shield to protect them from such distraction. It is as if they are not consenting adults having the right under the Constitution to make their own choices.
Such an idea, in fact, feeds the strength of all patriarchal societies to control their sisters and daughters, who are never destined to be independent women and whose sexuality is doomed to be controlled by patriarchy.
As the Indian subcontinent is the birthplace of four major religions of the world, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism; and according to 2011 census data, Hindus constitute 79.80% of the population, Muslims 14.23%, Christians 2.30%, Sikhs 1.72%, Buddhists 0.70% and Jains 0.37%. Therefore, such an idea should never take the shape of legislation as such law shall create a hostile and violent environment for religious communities and deter social harmony and shall definitely be anti-development especially when it is aimed at preventing a problem, which, far from being real, is ‘imaginary’.
(The writer is a lawyer and public policy expert and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law and Media Studies at School of Mass Communication, KIIT University. He can be reached at sjyotiranjan3@gmail.com.)