Thinking up smart labels for non-existent evils is a game that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its right-wing siblings are very good at. They are great believers in negative propaganda through catchy names. So it must have been a bit awkward for the government last month to have to admit in response to a query under the Right to Information Act that nothing has been defined by law as the tukde-tukde gang. Now it is the turn of the famous love jihad. That was a neat little term to describe a fantastical conspiracy: the conversion and marriage of Hindu girls to Muslim men for the purposes of radicalization. There was enough meat in the notion to permit the flowering of hate against the minority community for tainting the ‘honour’ of the majority. The more fanciful among the right-wing also claimed that such interfaith marriages were not only made to induct Hindu girls into the holy war but also to produce more children in the minority faith to upset the demographics of the country.
Only now, the minister of state for home affairs has had to state in the Lok Sabha, once again in response to a query, that no phenomenon called love jihad is recognized by law or discovered by any Central agency. That is an indirect admission — although none will be accountable for it — that the systematic and gleeful harassment of couples in interfaith courtships and marriages that had been conducted by mobs with the unspoken consent of the State — anti-Romeo gangs in Uttar Pradesh were reportedly formed with the blessings of Yogi Adityanath — was pure viciousness. One of the most shocking cases is that of Hadiya, who married a Muslim man and whose marriage was annulled by the Kerala High Court. It was the Supreme Court that set aside the high court’s ruling and brought the couple together. But the National Investigation Agency was not stopped from investigating other relationships in case there was something criminal. Obviously, the NIA has come up empty. Yet it is not as though radicalization did not happen. People left for Syria to fight on the side of extreme Islamic groups. Busy with fantastic conspiracy theories and eager to stamp on love, the government missed quite a number of these.
