The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance 2020 which claims to protect women from “love jehad”, in in fact a violent assault on women’s autonomy and will. This ordinance – as well as similar ordinances that are in place in Uttarakhand and in the pipeline in other BJP-ruled states – treats Hindu women as mere property of the Hindu community, not as individuals who can make their own choices.
In case after case filed by the UP police under this ordinance, we can see Hindu women being violently separated from their Muslim life-partners, by a toxic combination of Sanghi thugs and the police. In nearly all of the cases filed by the police under this ordinance, the woman asserts that she has loved and married of her own will – while it is her parents who, instigated by the Sanghi thugs, who have filed the complaint. In one case, the thugs and cops barged into a marriage ceremony that was underway and prevented it from taking place, even though the wedding had the blessing of the parents of both bride and groom.
The foul-mouthed street thugs who attack interfaith couples in UP are emboldened by the fact that one of their own men is the Chief Minister. The UP CM, announcing his decision to make this ordinance, warned “those who do love jehad must prepare for their funerals”. The ordinance has claimed its first life: the unborn child of a young inter-faith couple in Moradabad. A pregnant woman, violently separated from her husband, was imprisoned in a “shelter home” and subjected to a forced abortion in a government hospital. Her life, her health and her ability to bear children in the future was jeopardised by doctors who denied her antibiotics to prevent uterine infections.
The Moradabad case is not a case of mere “misuse” of the law. The law itself is designed to be used to overrule and override the will of adult women, because it allows members of the woman’s family to file a complaint even without her consent.
The UP ordinance and other similar laws in BJP-ruled states are inspired by the Manusmriti laws that prohibit inter-caste marriages, and laws that criminalised inter-racial marriage in Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa and the USA.
Many have approached the Allahabad High Court to challenge the UP anti-love ordinance – and it is certainly hoped that the Court will strike down the ordinance. There are many recent instances in which Courts have ruled to protect the right of adult women to love and marry who they choose. But the very fact that this right is repeatedly subjected to legal challenges, indicates how fragile it is today. With the anti-love laws, India’s ruling party wishes to strangulate that already fragile right.
The BJP is trying to define India as a country that hates love, and loves hate. It is for India’s people to fight back and prove otherwise. We must stand up to defend every loving couple against hate and discrimination. We must defy and resist the anti-love laws, and demand that they be scrapped, lock, stock and barrel. We must demand changes in the Special Marriage Act to do away with provisions that enable patriarchal interference and political meddling in a couple’s private decision to marry.
We must mobilise to resist the Hindu supremacist thugs that terrorise interfaith couples. We must demand that any government employee who acts as an agent of the thugs and leaks and information about impending marriages to vigilante groups, should lose his job and face prosecution. We must demand an end to all the laws seeking to curb conversion. Women must have the autonomy to decide who to marry, and oppressed communities must have the autonomy to decide which faith to embrace, without owing the State any explanation.
The CAA law, the anti-love laws, the three Farm Laws and the Labour Code Laws are all intended to dismantle hard-won Constitutional rights and liberties, and built the infrastructure of an authoritarian, pro-corporate Hindu Nation, where workers and farmers, women, Dalits, and minorities will all be subjugated subjects rather than rights-bearing citizens. Fight back to overthrow all these anti-Constitutional legislations, and assert social, economic, and political equality and freedom of every person in India!
