It’s the year 19G5.
Dear diary,
Today was a weird day. I decided to go out with this guy, let’s call him K, to get some pizza and drinks. We are eating our food and talking about poetry when this random dude decides to come to our table and starts yelling. He grabbed K by the neck and picked him up. When I resisted, he pushed me and shouted, “Shut up. You don’t understand, we are protecting you from this Jihadi jerk, who’s on a mission to force, allure, coerce you into conversion.”
Thankfully, there was a cop in the cafe. He asked me what’s happening. When I told him, he said, ‘Don’t worry, let me take care of this,’ and took him to the police van. K and I decided to head out, and on our way, discussed the political bogey of love jihad.
This is not an ideal world. It’s a normal world. There are bad people, bullies, and the concept of love jihad also exists, but there’s no anti-love jihad law and the police protects people from harassment of any kind, while also guarding people’s freedom to talk and eat together, and marry, if it leads to that, regardless of the religion they practice.
They also steer clear of asking the woman to shut up and be her saviour, when she’s not asking to be saved. It’s year 19G5 and it’s not legal for anyone to come and yell at my table because I’m talking to a Muslim guy.
Dear, diary. I will catch up later. Gotta travel to year 2021 where things look bleak, and I have to fight for my autonomy.
What is love jihad?
A hollow concept that reeks of Islamophobia and sexism. A lot of people have dwelled on the former aspect, and anybody with an ounce of sense would be repelled with the nonsensical rationale behind the right-wing conspiracy theory that men from the Muslim community are marrying women from other religious faiths, particularly Hindu women, and forcing them to convert to Islam.
But are we going to talk about the misogyny it conjures before they normalise taking away from us our freedom to choose, and get their ideological swords out to ‘protect’ us from the ruses of imaginary monsters?
In November 2020, Uttar Pradesh passed the first “anti-love jihad” law in the country, calling it Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance. The law requires interfaith couples to provide two months’ notice to a district magistrate before the wedding. The official, then, would have the discretion to decide whether the conversion was forced and the offender could be sentenced to 10 years in prison along with penalty.
Close to home, recently, BJP’s Karnataka state unit president Nalin Kumar Kateel in a party workers rally said: “We will bring in a similar law that will protect innocent Hindu girls from being cheated by cunning youth of other faiths.”
Love jihad goes with the assumption that women are stupid, naive and gullible to get tricked by men, especially Muslim men, with malicious intent, to be precise. It’s already a law in some BJP-ruled states and as many other states follow suit, I, as a woman with a brain of my own, am offended that the state thinks I cannot take my decisions. I am not protected, but enraged if you deprive me of my agency and choice.
Peddling prejudices under the cover of women safety: While the hypothesis is outrageous, its legalisation is further scary as it allows Islamophobic elements in the society to go about disrupting consensual weddings or outings, when one party belongs to a religion they diligently dislike.
It’s a choice
While women are being portrayed as the victims of the ploys of Muslim men, the state needs to know that when a woman decides to marry a Muslim man, it’s not love jihad, it’s a choice. They need to be reminded to stop peddling prejudices under the cover of women’s safety.
The arbitrary use of the law by authorities is not obscure. In one of the many instances, a UP Muslim teenager in December was booked for allegedly ‘trying to elope with a girl to marry and change her religion’, when they had, in fact, gone for an ‘outing’. The girl and her father had denied such claims, according to news reports.
The officer in the case is reported to have said that even if she went with him willingly, it will be considered abduction since she is a minor…In such cases, we consider that the man took the minor with him with an intention to commit a crime and that is why these sections have been invoked. It does not matter what the girl says.
“It does not matter what the girl says”: I cannot let others do the thinking for me. It’s my responsibility to myself and that’s feminism lesson 1.0. So, the next time they tell me with whom I should hangout or whom I should marry, or pronounce that I don’t have control of my own life, I would rather go back to the year 19G5, where I could have a pizza in peace, or even if something goes wrong, at least in the security of not having a police official tell me “It does not matter what I say”.
Dear diary,
I wish 19G5 was not a figment of my imagination.
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