Arrests under the new Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2020 have begun apace. It is not clear how the fundamental rights of freedom of religion and of the personal choice of consenting adults can be officially set at nought by a state. Although UP’s is not the only government to drum up the myth of love jihad, it is the first to promulgate an ordinance against religious conversion solely for marriage. The targeted discrimination at the heart of the law was made obvious by the police’s unequal treatment of two couples recently: the groom from the minority community in one case was thrown in jail while, in the other case, a woman from that community who had married a Hindu man was escorted home. The ordinance is a formal declaration of some of the regressive and repressive values being institutionalized in UP. These values seek to bar inter-faith unions where the groom is from India’s largest minority community, as well as inter-caste marriages, especially with Dalit men, and also destroy the autonomy of women. The attitude is far from being unique to UP; inter-caste marriages with Dalits lead to violence, murder and suicide in many states where outlawed khap panchayats and the crime of honour killings persist. What is remarkable in UP is the government’s official celebration of this attitude in contravention to the law of the land.

Yogi Adityanath’s government is a law unto itself. An official communiqué sent to local intelligence units recently asked them to keep an eye out for ‘illicit love affairs’ between lovers of different castes or communities. The scale of the tragedy of young people in inter-caste marriages is indicated by the fact that, in Bareilly division alone, there have been 42 suicides among 58 people killed in just two years for marrying into another caste. Sixteen people were allegedly killed since January 2019 for this reason — 12 murders and two double murders — with eight suicides and 17 couple suicides. This seems to be on a planet different from the Allahabad High Court, which reportedly ensured relief in November for 117 inter-faith and inter-caste couples whose lives and liberty were being threatened by relatives. How can a state government and its police violate the law in letter and spirit and get away with it?