THE BIG STORY OF 'LOVE JIHAD' : LOVE AND HATE

A CONTROVERSIAL NEW LAW IN UTTAR PRADESH, OSTENSIBLY INTENDED TO HINDER FORC IBLE CONVERSION IN INTERFAITH MARRIAGES, ISSEEN BY MAN YAS A COMMUN AL TACTIC AND A THREAT TO BASIC CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS

- KAUSHIK DEKA

The Uttar Pradesh police, on December 2, stopped a wedding between a 24-year-old Muslim man and a 22-year-old Hindu woman in Lucknow’s Duda Colony. The ceremony was to be solemnised as per Hindu rituals and had the consent of both families. The police, who were acting on a complaint by a vigilante group, asked the couple to seek the district magistrate’s nod for their marriage. Official permission for interfaith marriages is mandatory under the new Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance 2020, promulgated on November 28 by the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in the state.

While the couple in Lucknow was relieved to escape punitive action, others in UP have not been as lucky. Since the ordinance came into effect, police have registered five cases relating to interfaith marriages and arrested seven people. On December 6, members of the Sangh Parivar-affiliated Bajrang Dal reached the marriage registration office in Moradabad and took a Muslim man and a Hindu woman, who had come to register their marriage solemnised in July, to the police. The man and his brother were arrested on the basis of a complaint filed by the woman’s mother that her daughter had been lured into the marriage and converted. This was despite the woman asserting that her relationship was consensual. Two days later, on receiving a phone call that a Muslim man was marrying a Hindu woman after converting her, police stopped a marriage in Kushinagar and questioned the groom and the bride—both Muslims. The allegation turned out to be false and the couple got married the next day.