Meerut gangrape: 'Victim' confesses to eloping, will Hindutva groups drop 'love jihad' now?

The Meerut gangrape and forced conversion case, which had put the state of Uttar Pradesh on the verge of communal riots, has weakened in light of a new revelation by the victim where she has denied both the gangrape and conversion charges, and instead said that she had eloped with her Muslim boyfriend on her own.

According to a report in the Hindu the girl told the police that she had made the charges because she was being threatened by her family. She also gave a written statement denying both the gangrape and the conversion.

She wrote in the statement, “I was staying with my parents, but I ran away from home because I feel a threat to my life from my parents and relatives…I went with the boy belonging to a different community out of my own will.”

The man named Kaleem and eight others were arrested when the first complaint of gangrape and conversion was filed in August.

Superintendent of Police (Meerut Rural) MM Beg told the Hindu that the after running away from her house, the girl “approached a women’s police station on Sunday morning” and had been present before a Magistrate. She has been to the Meerut Nari Niketan as she had requested, adds the report.

When the initial reports about the gangrape had emerged, discrepancies were noticed in the girl’s tale.

In her complaint, the girl had claimed that she was kept captive after she was abducted on July 23 and taken to a madrasa in Hapur where she was gangraped before being shifted to Muzaffarnagar. She also claimed that in Muzaffarnagar many other girls were held captive but she couldn’t meet them. The police had not discovered any such captive girls when they had raided the madrasa.

The girl had also alleged that her attackers had forcibly operated upon her on 23 July. It was later discovered that the stitches on her abdomen were f rom a surgery for an ectopic pregnancy .

An Indian Express report had pointed out that the time that the victim’s statement had a lot of discrepancies.

For instance she had given a timeline that appears inexplicable. She was quoted as saying then, “When Ramzan started, again they started trapping me. I was taken to a madrasa in Hapur on 23 July where I was gangraped and got pregnant. They did an ultrasound and got me operated. I was taken to another madrasa in Muzaffarnagar on 30 July where an old woman would beat me up and feed me cow meat.”

While the girl has dropped her charges now, her initial revelations had caused a political storm in the region.

The BJP and Sangh Parivar has taken up the issue of her conversion and alleged that the incident revealed that the issue of ’love jihad’ a ploy by Muslim men to trick Hindu girls into falling for them and then forcing them to convert was a real threat in the region. BJP MP from Gorakhpur Yogi Adityanath had raked up the issue during the UP by polls campaign and said in a provocative speech that for for each Hindu girl converted to Islam, Hindus should convert 100 Muslim women to Hinduism.

He wasn’t the only who tried to play up the issue of love jihad.

BJP’s UP state leaders Laxmikant Bajpai and Vinay Katiyar had discussed the issue of ’love jihad’ in the party’s meeting ahead of the bypolls and insisted that it should figure in the party’s political resolution. Although it was not specifically mentioned in the final version of the statement, the party compromised by expressing ‘concern’ about reports of forced conversions.

Fringe groups like Dharma Jagran Manch in Meerut had also raked up the love jihad issue and even launched a campaign to tie Rakhis to Hindu girls, requesting them not to fell prey to Muslim youths who lure them to convert their religion.

Where the BJP was concerned, not everyone was convinced that this was an issue of importance. One leader had told IANS, “Bajpai has a penchant for melodramatic words in public discourse which should be avoided at all costs because they harm the party’s prospects…This ‘Love Jihad’ is a non-issue. It will have no takers outside the fringe.” Home Minister Rajnath Singh had then tried to avoid the issue altogether by saying that he had never heard of the term Love jihad.

For the BJP, though the issue didn’t really prove to be of any political help in the recently concluded by-elections, as the party lost 7 out the 11 seats they had in the state, including one belonging to its ally, the Apna Dal. The result was in fact, seen as a rejection of ‘polarising politics’ by the BJP, although there was no real evidence to say how or if the issue had impacted the final poll results.

Hindutva groups for their part, rejected the idea of abandoning the issue. According to this report in The Hindu,

In the aftermath of the BJP losing seven of its Assembly seats to the Samajwadi Party, the proponents of anti-‘love jihad’ campaigns in Western UP told The Hindu that their campaigns would go on with the “same or even more vigour and focus”.

According to the report:

Ajay Tyagi, an industrialist who formed Hindu Behen Beti Bachao Sangharsh Samiti, refused to buy the argument blaming Mahant Adityanath’s campaigntime focus on “love jihad” for the electoral drubbing. As part of his samiti’s work, Mr. Tyagi has started helpline numbers on which he attends calls, as he claimed, by “distressed” Hindu parents about their daughters being lured in ‘love’ by Muslim men.

He told this correspondent that the BJP would have won more seats, had Adityanath visited mote constituencies and raised the polarizing issue. “Look at the fact. Mahant Adityanath ji visited two constituencies-Noida and Lucknow and talked about ‘love jihad’ and the BJP won both of them,” he said.

There has been no reaction from the BJP or any of the other Hindutva groups, now that the poster child of their favourite issue has revealed herself to be a fraud.

Will this be enough to convince them to let go of the issue once and for all? Unlikely.