Love Jihad: Reality or Diversion

Amongst so many challenges India is facing, Five Bharatiya Janata Party ruled states have decided that one of their top priorities is to pass a law based on a theory aimed at preventing inter-faith marriages. The leader of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Assam and Karnataka have promised to introduced strict legal provisions to prevent “Love Jihad” a conspiratorial delusion that imagines, a vast, Country-wide plot by Muslim Men to dupe unsuspecting Hindu Women into marriage with the aim of converting them to Islam. The idea of “Love Jihad" had itself comes from what was once a fringe conspiracy theory among Christian and Hindu groups in Kerala that spread around the country thanks to misinformation networks, often picking stray incidents and weaving them into a grand narrative. The theory plays into older right-wing Hindu anxieties about the virility of Muslim men, the purported susceptibility of Hindu women and baseless fears about wholesale demographic change that w