A lot has been written about the impact of the anti-conversion ordinances — the love jihad laws in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. This analysis focuses on the right to choose, the right to love and that of religion. Apart from the impact of State sanctioned violence on and the incarceration of couples, the implications of these laws for the social and civic status of Muslims needs to be considered.
A recent empirical study of litigations on inter-faith marriages dispels the myth that there is a ‘Muslim conspiracy’ or ‘love jihad’. The study establishes that in “as many as 7 out of 10 cases”, the parents [of inter-faith couples] intervene illegitimately.
The law, then, is a clear manifestation of vigilante mobilization that the historian, Charu Gupta, describes as “the campaigns [which] construct an image of the Muslim male as aggressive, and broadcast a series of stereotypes and repetitive motifs, creating a common ‘enemy’ — the Other. The luring of Hindu women by Muslim men is stated to demonstrate the ‘lack of character’ of the sexually charged, lustful Muslim men, violating the pure body of Hindu women.”
In an opinion piece on the proposed laws, the political scientist, Christophe Jaffrelot, observed that “such a law would illustrate the transition from a de facto to a de jure Hindu Rashtra, something already evident from the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019).” These laws downgrade ‘the less than equal’ civic and social status of Muslim citizens. The legal scholar, Farrah Ahmed, has argued in the context of CAA that discriminatory laws demean a group of citizens, thereby constituting a ‘subordinating speech act’. She alludes to the racist ‘Jim Crow’ laws whose “implications for [Blacks’ social] status were impossible to miss”. Juxtaposed with “Articles 14, 15, 16 and 17 and the preambular commitment to ‘equality of status’”, giving “effect to an anti-subordination principle”, these laws are grossly unconstitutional.
The two requirements for subordination are fulfilled in the case of the love jihad laws. First, the lawmaker has the power to subordinate. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom in its 2020 annual report flagged the fact that 10 states already have stringent anti-conversion laws “that can be interpreted as prohibiting consensual conversions”. It also took note of recently passed laws in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat and Jharkhand that mete out greater punishments and stricter restrictions. The report argues that “… Empowered by anti-conversion laws and often with the police’s complicity, Hindutva groups also conduct campaigns of harassment, social exclusion, and violence against Christians, Muslims, and other religious minorities across the country.”
The arrest of Muslim men on the frivolous charge of engaging in ‘love jihad’ shows that the decision-making authority possesses sufficient power to lower the social standing of individuals belonging to religious minorities.
The second condition of the subordination test is also fulfilled through a State narrative and a campaign by vigilantes to vilify Muslims. There is no evidence to justify the necessity of this law apart from such narratives. A Kafkaesque legal regime unjustly and disproportionately burdens interfaith couples with procedural and substantive obligations while putting them under the risk of criminalization on account of their religious identity. The ordinance’s impositions of disabilities on inter-faith couples are ‘contrary to the basic concept of our system that legal burdens should bear some relationship to individual responsibility or wrongdoing’.
This denudation of a Constitutionally-guaranteed equal status should alert the citizenry about the Indian State’s ongoing transformation from a secular democracy to an ethno-majoritarian autocracy. As the debate on the legality of these laws continues, this testing time makes it incumbent on the people to re-affirm their faith in a secular democracy based on equal moral membership.
