India: Regressive social mindset - ‘love jihad’ sounds nutty, but it is now endorsed by India’s ruling party

"On Raksha bandhan — the Hindu holiday when sisters tie colourful, sacred threads on their brothers’ wrists — newspapers in Mumbai ran photographs of a slight, smiling girl with prosthetic arms tying rakhis on two wiry, young men. The girl’s name is Monika More, 16, and in January the wheels of a packed commuter train had sliced off her arms when she slipped between a platform gap. She survived because the men, brothers Nasim Chaudhary, 25, and Amjad Chaudhary, 24, jumped onto the tracks and rushed her to a hospital.

The photocaptions made it a point to mention that Monika, a Hindu, was saved by Muslims. Many may think it heartening, but it is a sign of India’s worsening times that the media pointedly mentioned the religion of the rescuers.

On the day Monika tied her rakhis, the RSS announced plans to bind — by the end of this week — rakhis to a million Hindu wrists, male and female, in western Uttar Pradesh, as a protective symbol against ‘love jihad’, allegedly a vast Muslim conspiracy to marry Hindu women and convert them to Islam.

The battle against ‘love jihad’ sounds nutty, but it is now endorsed by India’s ruling party, whose members make pronouncements once relegated to the fringes of the Hindu far right. “This is part of a global love jihad that targets vulnerable Hindu girls who are entrapped and forced to convert to Islam,” Chandramohan, a BJP spokesperson for UP, told The Hindu last week, after a Hindu teacher alleged she was gang-raped and so converted at a Meerut madrasa. “The BJP will … intervene on behalf of the victims.”

Love jihad isn’t the only wild idea moving with great rapidity from fringe to mainstream. Hindu ideologues from the edges are delighted at the quiet but enthusiastic reception to some of their ideas in government circles. In Gujarat, the state school textbook board has printed 50,000 copies each of nine books written by Vidya Bharati, the RSS’ education division. Its leading light, Dina Nath Batra, once looked on with amusement — not unsurprising, considering claims in the books of an ancient India manufacturing stems cells and automobiles — appears to generate awe or fear, depending on your ideological leanings..." (Continue reading.)