Who is afraid of BJP's 'love jihad'? The Congress party

New Delhi: Hindutva is now trying to enter drawing rooms, bedrooms and the boudoir, playing on people’s emotions. If, in the 1980s and 1990s, it invoked the past and invaded the puja room by invoking religiosity and people’s sentiments over the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute, more than 20 years down the line it is trying to tweak its anti-Muslim stance with a more contemporary and equally potent propaganda that peers into private spaces and goes by the name of ‘love jihad’. And the Congress, which tried to make the secular-communal faceoff a political issue in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections without any success, is at a loss on how to counter the possibility that the RSS and its various outfits may use this ‘love jihad’ as part of its ground level campaign to further communalise and polarise the atmosphere in Uttar Pradesh where elections are slated in 2017 and in other parts of the country. Already a marginal player in UP, such a campaign threatens to squeeze out whatever little life breath is left in the 129-year-old party in the state. ‘Love jihad’ or ‘Romeo jihad’ refers to alleged instances of love feigned by Muslim men to trap Hindu – or non-Muslim – girls into marriage before converting these young women to Islam. The combination of the two words ’love’ and ‘jihad’ carries dangerous overtones that threaten to subsume all inter-personal relationships and individual choices. The BJP was reportedly planning to include this in its political resolution during its state executive meeting in Mathura which had been called to prepare the roadmap for the 2017 Assembly polls. But it developed cold feet after its central leaders frowned at the idea and the opposition parties raised a hue and cry. Even though BJP’s state unit chief Laxmi Kant Bajpai alleged that “a particular community” is doing ’love jihad’, the subject did not figure in the document perhaps also because the BJP did not want to overtly deviate from the twin themes of development and good governance that hoisted the party and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi to power at the Centre. “The term is a media creation….The party is concerned about the deteriorating law and order situation in UP where the administration and the police show a bias towards a particular community,’’ said BJP’s national secretary Srikant Sharma, adding that the party was particularly concerned about the oppression of and violence against women in the state. [caption id=“attachment_1641475” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters.[/caption] But for many of the BJP’s ground level workers the failure to refer to the so-called ’love jihad’ in the document did not mean much because they had already imbibed the message that is likely reflect in their campaigns. Examples like those of Ranchi-based former shooter Tara Shahdeo in which she reportedly learnt of her husband’s Islamic name accidentally and reports that she was being forced to convert to Islam have only emboldened BJP workers to continue with their campaign. And those who have watched the BJP grow over the years would recall that the party took up the Ayodhya issue only after the VHP and some other RSS affiliates had done the spadework first. Many believe that the ’love jihad’ campaign will follow the same mode. Indeed it was only after the Dharma Jagran Manch –  an RSS outfit tasked to run campaigns to stop conversions of Hindus – called for a front against ’love jihad’ that the BJP’s UP unit began talking about it. And if the saffron party presses ahead with it, it would spell bad news for the Congress which is yet to get out of the trauma of the 2014 polls. Politically, the Congress can hope to fight off the BJP and its Hindutva ideology by reaching out to secular and anti-BJP forces as it did when it set up the UPA and defeated the BJP-NDA in the 2004 and the 2009 Lok Sabha polls and more recently, when it joined the RJD and the JD-U to keep the saffron party at bay in the by-elections to 10 Assembly seats in Bihar. But it starts fumbling and stumbling in nervousness when it has to deal with emotive issues such as the Ram temple agitation of the Hindutva brigade or the Mandal agitation of the social justice forces. The party will attempt a tightrope walk – not be seen as supporting the contention that a thing called ‘’love jihad’ exists, while at the same time asserting that if anyone has gone in for such a union with malafide intent then stern action should follow. “If there are complaints of this nature then there should be an impartial inquiry by a central agency or the judiciary but the BJP should not create hatred between people,’’ said senior Congress leader Shakeel Ahmed. “But they want to divide society and drive a wedge between different communities for the sake of getting some votes….They will stoop to any level,’’ he charged, while trying to put the BJP in the dock by pointing out that several Muslim leaders in that party have Hindu wives and their children bear Muslim names. In his tweet he wondered how the BJP would describe marriages like that between cine stars Hema Malini and Dharmendra who had adopted Islam to tie the knot. Notwithstanding this, the Congress is clearly worried on how to counter a campaign that threatens to stoke primal passions, specially in a society that continues to be divided among caste, communal and religious lines and theoretically swears by the honour and prestige of the community in general and of its girls and women in particular. Set against fears that the Muslim minority is trying to increase its population through the practice of taking four wives, ’love jihad’ gets an added sinister meaning by projecting that the entire womenfolk of the Hindu community is under siege. All that the Congress can think of now is to try and create social awareness against the attempts to divide communities and use its women wing to counter campaigns that show women to be vulnerable and gullible to emotional overtures. It also hopes to rope in NGOs to take the message down to the grassroots that such insinuations are an insult to women. Sources indicated that while the party is yet to discuss the issue, it is worried about the Hindutva brigade’s reported plan to make ‘Love jihad’ its subterranean campaign theme in UP where the law and order situation is already fragile because of an increase in communal riots and rapes and crime against women. Given the sensitivity of the subject, it is significant that Ahmed, a Muslim, has so far been the only senior Congress leader to react on the issue, with even the voluble Digvijaya Singh strangely keeping quiet for the moment. The Muslim groups, on their part, dismissed the charges as a “malicious campaign’’ by the Sangh affiliates. The Vice-Chancellor of Deoband’s Darul Uloom alleged that the term ’love jihad’ was coined to foment disturbances and marginalize the minority community. According to him, “A fight against the evil is called ‘jihad’. But some people are using this to disturb communal harmony in the country for political gains. Linking such negative ideas with Islam is against the betterment of the country. Islam doesn’t identify anything called Love Jihad,” he said. The latest attempt to whip up passions over ’love jihad’ in UP and elsewhere are linked to similar moves in Kerala and Karnataka, specially since 2009 where Christian and Hindu groups alleged that their girls were befriended with the intent of converting them to Islam and dumped after marriage. There were allegations that this was part of a “global Islamisation design’’ and even had a terror link to it which needed probing. Indeed, outfits such as Sree Ram Sene alleged that Muslim extremist youths seduced Hindu women and used them for terror activities. Amid such charges, the Kerala and the Karnataka High Courts were requested to look into the matter. In a replay of the adage that there was no smoke without fire, the two worried governments admitted to the conversions but, intent on preventing a communal flare-up, denied it was done under duress. They assured that they would neither permit forcible conversions nor allow a hate campaign against Muslims. The controversy lost its intensity over the months but the embers continue to smoulder, threatening to turn into a major conflagration at the first spark. The fact that Keralite economy was bolstered by remittances from West Asia only added to the suspicions. Coupled with fears about the increasing radicalization of Muslim youths and reports of some joining jihadi outfits such as the ISIS,  the ‘Love jihad’ campaign, if launched, would make for a lethal and volatile mix.