UP Police’s own jihad

The Lawless State

The Uttar Pradesh police is showcasing quite brazenly how the state’s recently promulgated `Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion Bill 2020’ ordinance is being selectively applied to members of the Hindu and Muslim communities. The basic principle under our Constitution is that the law must be applied uniformly for all citizens, regardless of what community they belong to. But in UP, the police have come out blatantly against members of the minority community.

Take the examples of two Muslim women in Bareilly district who converted in order to marry Hindu men.

In one case, the woman was living in Hafizganj village in Bareilly district. Following her conversion to the Hindu faith, she immediately sought the help of the police. Not only was she given police protection, but the cops sent for the family members of both the bride-to-be and the bridegroom in order to ‘settle’ the matter -- a euphemism for ironing out any objections to the marriage that may have arisen by either side.

With neither side raising any objection, the marriage was solemnised through Hindu rites on December 24. Several members of a right-wing outfit came forward to support the couple and facilitated the marriage by arranging for a pandit. The marriage took place within the premises of the police station.

In the second case, which also took place in Bareilly district, a Muslim family objected both to their daughter’s converting to become a Hindu and to her decision to marry a Hindu boy. The family filed cases of abduction and kidnapping against the groom, but he has not been arrested. That’s not the fate that Muslim men who wanted to marry Hindu women have met with under the current dispensation.

It is evident that the ordinance is meant solely to prosecute Muslim men. Even a dalliance with a Hindu girl can prove disastrous now.

Recently, in Bijnor, young Saqib’s invitation to his former classmate, a 16-year-old Dalit girl, to go out for a pizza on December 14, landed him in jail. He has been arrested under the extremely serious charges of trying to abduct a minor girl with the intention to convert her to his religion in order to marry her.

An innocuous outing has seen this young boy, whose family insists he is only 17 (while the cops claim he is 18), being charged with abduction under sections of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and also the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. If convicted, it would mean a jail term of at least 10 years for the boy.

If the boy’s widowed mother could prove that her son is indeed only 17, he would be tried under the Juvenile Justice Act. Sadly, she has no documents to prove this important detail. If the government had focused on compulsory registration of all births, this would not have come to pass.

Both the girl and her father have themselves repeatedly said that Saqib did not have any plans to marry her or to get her to convert. The girl’s father has gone to the extent of stating that the police themselves dictated the complaint and exerted pressure on him to sign on the dotted line.

Such selective and excessive actions by the police are being repeated in case after case. Take the instance of the Etah couple. The police issued warrants of arrest against the groom Javed Ansari and 20 of his relatives, including three women. The UP police launched a virtual manhunt and, by December 22, they had arrested Ansari’s father, elder brother, cousin, cousin’s friend, three brothers-in-law, father-in-law, father-in-law’s brother and his son. For five members of Ansari’s family who are not traceable, the police offered a reward of Rs 25,000 on each for information about their whereabouts, as though they were hardened criminals.

The bride, Ayushi Pachauri, who chose to become a Muslim and adopt the name of Ayesha, was taken into custody on December 23, having been found living in the home of a friend of Ansari in Delhi. She was taken back to Etah, but she has insisted that she will give her statement only before a court of law.

Uttar Pradesh has already witnessed over 35 such cases of alleged ‘love jihad’. And this arrest paranoia is spreading.

Uttarakhand police is now following the example of UP police. Uttarakhand introduced an anti-conversion law two years ago, but it was not applied until now. Four persons, a Muslim man, his Hindu wife, the groom’s uncle and the qazi who solemnised the wedding, were arrested in Dehradun on December 30, though the marriage was solemnised in September 2020.

Ironically, when Uttarakhand was carved out of UP in 2000, the then state government had introduced a scheme to promote inter-caste and interfaith marriages by providing a cash incentive of Rs 50,000 to couples who married outside their faith or caste.

The arrest contagion has now spread to Madhya Pradesh, which passed an anti-conversion ordinance recently, with the provision of a jail sentence of up to 10 years.

Right-wing outfits, such as the Bajrang Dal, are taking the law into their hands, beating up couples and pressuring the police to act against interfaith couples and their families. They are ensuring that the police arrest interfaith couples even when they are protected by the Constitution.

It is evident that these ordinances and the police action are meant to consolidate Hindu public opinion against the alleged “devious machinations” of Muslim men. The objective is equally to distract people from the state governments’ abject failures of governance. These failures are reflected on many fronts. For instance, the health indices released by Niti Aayog for 2019 have listed UP, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand among the worst-performing states.

In keeping with the Hindutva ideology, the ordinances are a patriarchal blow to the independence of women and their right to choose whom to love and marry, thereby infringing on women’s freedom of choice and right to life. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, the women involved are adults.

(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist)