As if a spluttering economy, the highest unemployment figures ever recorded and a massive farmers’ agitation besieging the nation’s capital last month weren’t enough, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has created another crisis for our beleaguered nation in its campaigns: a culture war.
Police in the country’s largest state, BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh, had already arrested 34 persons in late 2020 and filed several cases under the state's new anti-conversion law within a month of its passage. Aimed at combating the largely imaginary crime of "love jihad" – a fantastic conspiracy theory according to which Muslim men are accused of seducing Hindu women as a ploy to oblige them to change their religion to Islam – the law takes a battle-axe to the freedom of worship enjoyed by Indian citizens under the country’s liberal-democratic constitution.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, the saffron-robed monk whose inflammatory rhetoric has made him one of his party’s best-known and most polarising figures, decreed the law in late 2020 with a maximum punishment of 10 years for its violation. The new Uttarakhand common civil code of 2024 also outlaws conversion.
According to the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion law, a marriage will be declared "null and void" if the conversion of a woman is solely for marriage. Those wishing to change their religion after marriage need to apply to the District Magistrate for permission, a requirement that stunningly manages to combine misogyny, patriarchy and religious bigotry in a breathtaking assault on individual liberty. Worse still, a marriage under the Special Marriages Act requires couples to publicly post a notice of their intention for a 30-day period before actually marrying, which in UP amounts to an invitation for assault and retribution by elements hostile to their choice.
The way out of the notice period, for inter-religious couples, was for one partner to undergo a religious conversion, however insincere it might be, so that the marriage could be solemnised without delay. Another brief ray of hope came through two Allahabad High Court judgements: one that affirmed that the notice period required under the Special Marriages Act was an invasion of the couples’ privacy, and another that declared that registration of any marriage could not be deferred until couples had obtained approval from the authorities for conversion, as the new law required. Sadly, last month, the Allahabad High Court went the other way, rejecting petitions by eight inter-faith couples seeking the court’s protection for their marriages. The most recent judgment insists that all such marriages must be compliant with the anti-conversion law.
The cases reported so far usually involve Hindu women seeking to marry romantic partners without their family's approval, prompting their fathers to allege that the prospective grooms were trying to pressure their daughters to convert to Islam, thereby attracting the provisions of the new law. But there are also some cases that go the other way – Muslim women seeking to marry Hindu men, also in the face of extreme disapproval from their families.
Much of India has long celebrated the intermingling of Hindu and Muslim cultural practices in what is referred to as “Ganga-Jumni Tehzeeb”, or the “composite culture” emerging from the interaction of practitioners of the two faiths. This is now under assault from officially-fomented bigotry. The BJP, which derived its political strength from campaigning aggressively as the vehicle of an assertive Hindu community, polarising public opinion on perceived Muslim transgressions has been seen as a vote-winner.
Its successful campaign to build the Ram temple on the site of a demolished mosque, to criminalise the “triple talaq” divorce resorted to by some Muslims, to dismantle the special protections afforded to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, and to pass a Citizenship Amendment that would exclude Muslims from the fast-track citizenship available to refugees of other faiths, have all reinforced its “tough on Muslims” image. The party’s efforts to outlaw alleged attempts to convert Hindu women to Islam through marriage is of a piece with such deeply-entrenched Islamophobia.
The state governments of Madhya Pradesh and Haryana have announced plans to enact similar laws, and it is unlikely that the newly-restored BJP government in Rajasthan will remain an exception. We know that even in Uttar Pradesh, the police have already dropped, for lack of evidence, seven of the 34 “love jihad” cases it had opened. This hasn’t dampened the zeal of the bigots, however.
Just a few years ago, the jewellery brand Tanishq, whose advertising pitches it as the favoured choice of “modern” and progressive young customers, was pressured, including by threats of violence against its stores, to withdraw a television commercial portraying a happy interfaith marriage between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man.
Though Islam remains the favoured target, the BJP’s Hindu chauvinism has taken umbrage at the cultural practices of the Christian minority too. One of the many affiliated organisations of the Hindutva movement, the Bajrang Dal, regularly threatens Hindus who visit churches for Christmas with violence. While Hinduism teaches reverence for other faiths, those who claim to be its doughty warriors admit no such ecumenism.
Valentine’s Day has also been a favoured target of the Hindutva warriors. Arguing that it is un-Indian because it celebrates romantic love, Hindutva activists have attacked couples holding hands on February 14th, trashed stores selling Valentine's Day greeting cards and shouted slogans outside cafes with canoodling couples.
Ironically, the Hindutva brigade has no real idea of Hindu tradition - their idea of Indian values is not just primitive and narrow-minded, it is also profoundly anti-historical. India's culture has always been a capacious one, expanding to include new and varied influences, from the Greek and Muslim invasions to the British. The central battle in contemporary Indian civilization is that between those who acknowledge that as a result of our own historical experience, we are vast and contain multiple diversities, and those who have presumptuously taken it upon themselves to define, in increasingly narrower terms, what is "truly" Indian.
Modern Hinduism has always prided itself on its tolerance for difference. In fact, the most famous Hindu sage of the modern era, Swami Vivekananda, persuasively taught that the hallmark of Hindu civilization was not just tolerance but acceptance. The Hindu chauvinists are fundamentally betraying Hinduism, as well as assaulting the Constitution. Their narrow-mindedness and bigotry betray the very culture they claim to be defending.
The issue is not a trivial one. If intolerant bullies, now enjoying the blessing of elected BJP governments, are allowed to get away with their acts of intolerance and “lawful” intimidation, India would be allowing them to do violence to an ethos profoundly vital to its survival as a civilization, and as a liberal democracy.
Pluralist and democratic India must, by definition, tolerate plural expressions of its many identities. To allow the self-appointed arbiters of Hindu culture to impose their hypocrisy and double standards on the rest of us is to permit them to define Indianness down until it ceases to be Indian. The culture war must be fought in the courts – but even more in the hearts of all Indians. The ballot box is a good place to start.
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Stop the Culture War
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15.04.2024
As if a spluttering economy, the highest unemployment figures ever recorded and a massive farmers’ agitation besieging the nation’s capital last month weren’t enough, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has created another crisis for our beleaguered nation in its campaigns: a culture war.
Police in the country’s largest state, BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh, had already arrested 34 persons in late 2020 and filed several cases under the state's new anti-conversion law within a month of its passage. Aimed at combating the largely imaginary crime of "love jihad" – a fantastic conspiracy theory according to which Muslim men are accused of seducing Hindu women as a ploy to oblige them to change their religion to Islam – the law takes a battle-axe to the freedom of worship enjoyed by Indian citizens under the country’s liberal-democratic constitution.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, the saffron-robed monk whose inflammatory rhetoric has made him one of his party’s best-known and most polarising figures, decreed the law in late 2020 with a maximum punishment of 10 years for its violation. The new Uttarakhand common civil code of 2024 also outlaws conversion.
According to the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion law, a marriage will be declared "null and void" if the conversion of a woman is solely for marriage. Those wishing to change their religion after marriage need to apply to the District Magistrate for permission, a requirement that stunningly manages to combine misogyny, patriarchy and religious bigotry in a breathtaking assault on individual liberty. Worse still, a marriage under the Special Marriages Act requires couples to publicly post a notice of their intention for a 30-day period before actually marrying, which in UP amounts to an invitation for assault and retribution by elements hostile to their choice.
The way out of the notice period, for inter-religious couples, was for one partner to undergo a religious conversion, however insincere it........
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