Under the guise of preventing forced religious conversions, a strident campaign is aiming to nip in the bud that rare and delicate flower o...
Under the guise of preventing forced religious conversions, a strident campaign is aiming to nip in the bud that rare and delicate flower of Hindu-Muslim romance.
Bharatiya Janata Party-led states have promised to crack down on what the Hindutva ecosystem has termed “love jihad”. According to this conspiracy theory, Muslim men are actively wooing Hindus with the aim of getting them to change their religion after they are married. Hours after Uttar Pradesh’s governor Anandiben Patel promulgated the Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2020, on Saturday, the Adityanath-led government filed its first case against a Muslim man in Bareilly.
Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Assam and Karnataka are threatening to match Uttar Pradesh’s effort.
An unexpected casualty of this majoritarian legislation is likely to be the inter-faith movie. The controversy that followed a kiss between a Muslim man and the Hindu protagonist in the web series A Suitable Boy indicates that the trolls may not be watching these shows all the way till the end (the boy doesn’t get the girl) but that they are outraged by the very idea of Muslims and Hindus entering romantic relationships. With real life so threatening, why would filmmakers stick their necks out in service of fiction?
The Hindu-Muslim movie romance has never been easy to pull off, especially after Hindutva politics...
