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Growing surveillance and policing of interfaith marriages in Maharashtra
Updated On: 19 February, 2023 08:03 AM IST | Mumbai | Yusra Husain
Bolstered by politicians, the ‘love jihad’ brigade has arrived in Mumbai, scouring through court circulars on new marriage registrations to trace interfaith couples prepping to seal their relationship. Is Maharashtra headed the UP way?
Illustration/Uday Mohite
What is jihad, you ask? If you leaf through one of the most trusted Urdu-to-Urdu dictionaries, Feroz-ul-Lughat, first published in 1897, you will come across words like koshish and jad-o-jehad. English synonyms to these Urdu words would be effort, struggle, toil, strive and labour, translated in the Muslim world as “personal struggle towards righteousness”. But this is not what the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or other right-wing organisations demanding laws against “love-jihad” say it means. “Muslim men are converting innocent Hindu women to Islam [on a large scale] using fraud and deception like love,” Milind Parande, national general secretary of VHP, tells mid-day in a telephonic interview.
On December 13, the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadvanis led Maharashtra government constituted a state-level panel—Intercaste/Interfaith Marriage-Family Coordination Committee. One of the key functions of the panel, which came in the wake of the gruesome murder of Shraddha Walkar, allegedly by her live-in partner Aftab Poonawala in May 2022, was to monitor marriages out of caste or religion. Walkar was estranged from her family.
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