Love Jihad is an organized crime where an organized syndicate recruits a gullible victim by deception in the form of love and then exploits the victim in captivity. The government has on the record submitted to the Supreme Court that young girl in distress is targeted, which indicates that the vulnerability is exploited
It is a never-die topic that has ignited widespread discussion across the country. Intellectuals (pseudo) try to define it as a potentially belligerent topic, projected to be a bone of contention between the secular and the right-wing thinkers. Many pretentious scholars have taken up the floor to argue the concept of love jihad and have picked cudgels to prove that the concept is a faultily fabricated divisive idea. It is colored as a politically motivated issue, a slanderous myth created in an attempt to malign a particular community by a certain ideological group. Hence, it becomes important to understand if love jihad has been created mistakenly by clubbing two terms—Love and Jihad—or it is a factually planned action and not fiction. Let us objectively define both words and understand the idea behind using these terms together and the implications.
‘Jihad’, as per the Islamic religious text, means ‘Striving to uphold the cause of God’. The texts related to ‘Jihad’ in the scriptures have been misinterpreted by extremist groups, patronizing violence, as a war for religion waged to protect and expand Islamism under the ideology of pan-Islamism. Popularly, Jihad is propagated by fundamentalists as a war adopting all possible tools to spread Islam. Can ‘Love’ be one of those instruments used to wage a Jihadi war? This article intends to analyze it to understand if ‘Love Jihad’ is a myth or a fact.
When an Islamic religious fundamentalist group, under a well-thought-of strategy, selects a vulnerable person of another religion and through a recruiter use ‘love’ as a tool to trap the person with malicious intention, it is Love Jihad. Often marriage is a culmination of such entrapment. So, Love Jihad is a concept to propagate Islamism by converting non-Muslims to Muslims by enticing them deceitfully or forcefully into marriage. The higher propensity is of non-Muslim women than men being lured into relationships with the objective to convert them to Islam. Interestingly, even the intelligence agency reports have admitted to this modus operandi adopted by fundamental outfits.
Hence, such conversions clearly violate the fundamental right provided in the Constitution to profess, practice, and propagate religion, as it is fraudulently trapped conversion and not out of own volition.
Here it is pertinent to mention that all inter-religious marriages cannot be termed as Love Jihad. It has to be strategically selected trapped marriages. The term ‘Love Jihad’ has received legal status with acceptance of the term by the country’s highest courts, High Court, and Supreme Court of India. The bigger pertinent question emanating from Love Jihad is whether the intention is the mere conversion or a bigger plan involved under the garb of such marriages.
The process involved in Love Jihad is akin to the organized crime of human trafficking. For an action to be human trafficking, the mandatory process involved includes recruitment of a victim by use of force, fraud or deception, use of money, abuse of position, etc., for exploitation, as given in United Nations Palermo Protocol section 370 of Indian Penal Code. Within the definition of trafficking, the most read and discussed forms of exploitation is for sex and forced labor. Love Jihad is an organized crime where an organized syndicate recruits a gullible victim by deception in the form of love and then exploits the victim in captivity. The government has in the record submitted to the Supreme Court that young girl in distress is targeted, which indicates that the vulnerability is exploited. The intelligence agency of Kerala has admitted in court the funding from foreign land through local fundamental groups to carry out Love Jihad. There is evidence of Muslim boys using love as a vehicle of recruitment by deceptively impersonating as a Hindu boy or giving a false identity. So, conclusively, Love Jihad falls under the category of bride trafficking, a form of sex trafficking.
Within the dimension of sex trafficking, bride trafficking is ignored most because of the sanctity conferred to the marriage institution. The hostility generated in the case of inter-caste or inter-religious marriages is normally opposed under the framework of legal rights accorded to the adults to choose. This opposition is used as a shield by the fundamentalists to abuse the system and recruit victims through Love Jihad. Here it is important to understand that this form of bride trafficking is not limited only to sexual exploitation but also for other purposes while the victim is captive. There are shreds of evidence where a person recruited through love jihad has been used either as a combatant or non-combatant in Syria and other places where Islamic terrorist outfits are operating, besides being used as comfort girls. John Horgan of Georgia State University, through a concept of ‘Double Marginalisation,’ has explained in detail how a converted person is susceptible to radicalization. A study by Scott Kleinman and Scott Flower has shown that though only 2 to 3 percent of Britain’s 2.8 million Muslims converted; still constituted 31 percent of Jihadist terrorism convictions during 2001 to 2010.
Many of the important issues pertaining to internal security or human rights land up in controversy and fail to attract serious, thoughtful consideration because it originates from a particular school of thought. The gravity and seriousness of the organized crime of ‘Love Jihad’ have been written off with the accusation of it being a fascination of right-wing thinkers. Politicising an organized crime of serious proportion is a disastrous development.
Love Jihad is a global problem and is being used worldwide to recruit vulnerable non-Muslims for exploitation. In India, even the highest courts have observed that if religious conversion is a precondition in marriages, then religion is more prominently reflected than love in such a relationship. Recent laws against forced conversion, brought in some States, accept that in Love Jihad, the visible propaganda of love is fake and the ulterior motive is ill-interpreted Jihad through Love. Appeasement of religious community at the cost of the country’s internal security, compromising the victim’s human rights, is an unfortunate corollary of vote bank politics in India. It is high time that cutting across religion and politics everyone acknowledges that Love Jihad is a reality, adopted by Islamic fundamental terrorist groups to destabilize the internal security of a country.
