‘Love Jihad’: India Is Further Dividing Hindus & Muslims – By Betwa Sharma
The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) has passed a law against a baseless conspiracy theory called “love jihad,” which claims Muslim men are attempting to change India’s demography by enticing Hindu women and converting them to Islam through marriage.
The new law exposes interfaith couples and makes it much harder for them to get married in a society where families and even the local constabulary resort to threats and violence to stop intercaste and interfaith marriages.
The law violates fundamental constitutional rights of life and liberty, privacy, religious freedom and equality. It further poisons a country where religious polarisation brought on by the Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has roots in an Indian fascist movement from the 1920s, has already made people far less invested in India’s core values of secularism and pluralism….
