An uninhibited and carefree dance video of two college mates in Kerala has become the latest target of the Right wing, which has chosen to sully the fluid movements with its pet smear weapon of “love jihad”.

The 30-second dance video featuring Janaki Omkumar and Naveen K. Razak had set the Internet on fire with lakhs of shares and likes. The scrub-wearing students of the Government Medical College in Thrissur dance in an empty house surgeons’ corridor and room to the tune of the 1978 Boney M hit Rasputin.

Lawyer Krishna Raj, whose Hindu Right wing leanings are evident from his social media pages, has spied in the dance a communal angle. Unhindered by the diatribe, Janaki and Naveen have performed another dance during a radio show and uploaded the video on social media, and also chosen to take into account the thousands of comments decrying Raj and supporting them.

Sharing a still from the Rasputin video on Thursday, Raj commented on Facebook: “Smell something fishy. Would be good if Janaki’s parents take note of this. Didn’t Nimisha’s mother prove that one doesn’t need to be sad if one is cautious? We can pray for Janaki’s father Omkumar and (her) mother.”

Nimisha, now Fathima, was reported missing in 2016 and was found with surrendered Islamic State members in Afghanistan two years later. Although Raj did not mention “love jihad”, he left scant room for doubt that he was referring to the Right wing allegation of Muslim men luring Hindu women into marriage to indoctrinate and radicalise them.

Several BJP-ruled states have introduced laws against the so-called love jihad. Speaking to the newspaper later, Raj ended up alleging “love jihad” although he had moments before pointed out that he had not used the words in his social media post.

While Janaki is a third-year MBBS student, Naveen is in the final year. Both are members of the medical college’s dance group, Vikings.

Janaki told The Telegraph on Friday: “We look at the brighter side of this and don’t really care about what a few people have been commenting. There are so many positive comments, so we are not worried about what a few might want to say.”

“We have complete support from our parents and families,” Janaki, who hails from a state that is often lauded for its syncretic and progressive culture, said.

She said the video had so far clocked close to 10 million views going by the different pages where it had been posted.

While the original post on YouTube had registered more than 2.2 lakh views by Friday evening, other videos of the dance uploaded by admirers had been viewed more than half a million times.

“It’s being posted by so many people. So we don’t really care about some nasty comments,” Janaki said.To send a message to the likes of Raj, the Government Medical College students’ union has got 12 dancers from the Vikings team to kick off a “Rasputin challenge”. The Aikya College Union on Friday posted a video with the 12 dancers, including Janaki and Naveen. All of them, wearing scrubs, jive to Rasputin.

Suraj, a house surgeon who handles the union’s Facebook page told this newspaper that it was their way of taking on the lawyer’s hate messages. The video was posted with the comment: “If your intention is to hate, our decision is to resist.”

The union also shared the names of the 12 students, along with those of two others who had filmed and edited the video, with the footnote that haters could get some more reason to spew venom on social media if they searched for the “heads and tails” — caste and religious names — of the students in the new video.

Raj was skewered on social media while support poured in from all quarters for Janaki and Naveen.

The Kerala unit of the IMA-Medical Students’ Network called for a drastic change in the perspective of viewing camaraderie between students, many of whom excel in dance and music. “Discussing the artistes’ religion instead of the art itself points at a very warped atmosphere in the society that needs to change immediately,” it said.

The Rasputin video of Janaki and Naveen, posted on April 1, had taken time to catch the imagination of viewers outside the medical college campus. But once it did, the duo were pitchforked into the limelight.

At a recent radio show, the two students broke into an impromptu jig on a hip-hop remix of Paadi, a hit song from the 1997 Malayalam blockbuster Aaram Thampuran.

They told the radio station that they were active members of the college’s Vikings dance group and performed quite regularly. The Rasputin video had been filmed by a college mate on a mobile phone.

Janaki and Naveen told the radio channel that they were good friends. “We are studying together. We often go to have food together. So we danced together. That’s all. We will continue to dance together,” they said in a statement to the station.

Janaki is the only daughter of a doctor mother and scientist father who works at the Rajiv Gandhi Centre of Biotechnology in Thiruvananthapuram. Naveen’s parents are business people from Mananthavady in Wayanad. His elder brother and sister-in-law are civil engineers based in Hyderabad.

Raj, the lawyer, justified his remarks and pointed out that he had not mentioned “love jihad”. He, however, hinted at the allegation while speaking to this newspaper.

Raj suggested that it could be interpreted as a word of caution against the students injuring themselves while doing fast-paced dance moves.

“I never mentioned ‘love jihad,’ but only said the girl’s parents better take care. My comments can also be interpreted as a caution again twisting their backs with such dance moves,” Raj told this newspaper on Friday, claiming he was not a member of any political party.

“I never said they are involved in ‘love jihad,’ mentioned their religion or said anything that can be construed as libellous,” he insisted.

Asked why he had made such distasteful comments on two youngsters, Raj retorted that he had filed about 4,000 habeas corpus petitions on behalf of parents seeking to know the whereabouts of their missing daughters.

“That is my justification for the comments and what I saw (in the video) is a typical ‘love jihad’ experiment,” he said.

Raj pointed out that Kerala High Court judge K.T. Sankaran had in December 2009 asked the government to enact a law against forcible conversions in the name of “love”.

But the Lok Sabha had in a question from Congress MP from Kerala Benny Behanan clarified there was no instance of “love jihad” in Kerala. “The term ‘love jihad’ is not defined under the extant laws. No such case of ‘love jihad’ has been reported by any of the central agencies,” junior home minister G. Kishan Reddy had said in reply to Behanan in February 2020.