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“New” Muslim Women and the Myth of “Love Jihad”: From Victims to Security Threats

Nidah Kaiser

Abstract

This paper seeks to untangle the intertwined nature of securitization and gendered Islamophobia through the prism of the newly enacted anti-conversion law in Uttar Pradesh, commonly known as the “love jihad” law. The Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act 2021, promulgated by the state of Uttar Pradesh on November 28, 2020, prohibits the religious conversion of individuals or groups by “misrepresentation, force, fraud, undue influence, coercion, allurement or marriage.” The Act legitimizes what has gripped the popular imagination as the myth of “love jihad,” or the conversion of a Hindu woman to Islam through marriage to a Muslim man. Against this background, this paper examines how the state, through the imposition of the law, affixes permanence to the identity of the “new” Muslim woman, not only as a victim but also a security threat to the nation. This paper is based on fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh focusing on four cases of alleged forced conversion. It draws on documentary sources and interviews with multiple stakeholders—“new” Muslim women and their family members, the accused men and their family members, district court defense and prosecution advocates, and civil and women’s rights activists.

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Introduction

  • 1 The Bajrang Dal is a militant Hindu nationalist group that comprises the youth wing of the Vishva H (...)

1In November 2020, in Hardoi, Uttar Pradesh (UP), the Hindutva vigilante group—Bajrang Dal1—intercepted an 18-year-old Hindu woman and her 25-year-old Muslim male partner at a district court where the couple were about to register their interfaith marriage under the Special Marriage Act (Bhardwaj 2020). Armed with UP’s new anti-conversion law, the Bajrang Dal prevented the interfaith marriage and had the woman “picked up” by her father who was “informed” about her presence at the courthouse (Bhardwaj 2020). A week later, the police registered an unlawful conversion case against the Muslim man at the behest of the woman who, while in her father’s custody, complained that her Muslim partner had forced her to convert to Islam (PTI 2020). This case is exemplary of the use of the new anti-conversion law, as part of a larger set of discriminatory measures and actions against Muslims, wherein the police arrest Muslim men under charges of forced conversion (PTI 2020). The Bajrang Dal zila coordinator, Pawan Rastogi, told journalists on the news portal The Print:

When a woman puts her foot outside her house without her father’s permission, the Bajrang Dal comes in the picture. In this case too, we stepped in, because she was going with a Muslim man, and we will never allow it. Our job is to secure our religion and we will make sure that happens. We will not let Muslims spread jihad. Thanks to this law, we can operate freely. (Bhardwaj 2020)

2In India, the religious conversion of women to any religion, especially to Islam and Christianity, through interfaith marriage has historically been a fraught affair, receiving opposition from family members, society, and even the state (Robinson and Clarke 2007). The most recent PEW Report on religious tolerance in India found that a net 82 percent of Hindus and 89 percent of Muslims are against interreligious marriage of women from their own community (Pew Research Centre 2021:9). Regardless of the religious community, Indians believe that it is “very important to stop people in their own community from marrying into other religious groups” (Pew Research Centre 2021:9). Under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime, the dominance and control of the state over its citizens’ lives has intensified through the law-and-order machinery. In several states, new anti-conversion laws, conversely named “Freedom of Religion” laws, have been implemented to allegedly control “love jihad.”

3The myth of “love jihad” is a creation of the Sangh Parivar (family of organizations espousing the Hindutva ideology) and more broadly the Hindu right, who view consensual, personal relationships between couples through a masculinist, communal lens (Uma and Saxena 2021). Coined by non-state, right-wing organizations in 2009 in Kerala, the expression “love jihadaims to portray interfaith marriage of a Muslim man to a Hindu woman as a religious act of war—a jihad. No longer limited to non-state actors, the idea has gained popularity among BJP ministers, and their voters, who have been led to believe that unsuspecting Hindu women are coaxed or lured into marrying Muslim men, and converting to Islam. This has been driven by political propaganda about Muslims outnumbering Hindus in India, and the fear that Hindus will eventually be relegated to a minority. The threat that Muslim men will marry and convert Hindu women has led to growing familial and societal control over women, who are perceived as needing protection. Consequently, there has been an institutionalization of family patriarchy through the legal codification of conversion, and the outsourcing of familial control and violence to state agencies. 

  • 2 At the time of writing this article, the BJP-led government in Rajasthan clarified its commitment t (...)

4Of the 28 Indian states, nine have instituted laws regulating religious conversion including: Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh.2 In spite of India’s long history of anti-conversion legislation (Yaseen 2021), BJP governments in several states have nevertheless introduced new anti-conversion legislation that includes clauses about interfaith marriage, such as in Jharkhand in 2017, Uttarakhand in 2018, Uttar Pradesh in 2021, and Haryana in 2022. BJP-led governments have also brought about amendments to existing laws, in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat in 2021, and Himachal Pradesh in 2022, to regulate interfaith marriage. These amendments prohibit proselytization by “coercion, allurement, influencing, convincing, misrepresentation” and even marriage, and mandate district authorities to deal with those seeking to convert and marry.

5Against this background, this article studies four cases filed under the UP anti-conversion law to examine the ways in which anti-minority prejudice is substantiated in terms of legal measures that govern the private lives of women. The article addresses the way the formulation and the enactment of the anti-conversion law in UP shapes the relationship between newly converted Muslim women and the state and other sites of power, such as the family, society, and vigilante groups. How does the Hindutva state perceive such women, and how do these perceptions affect the treatment meted out to them by the state and society? In engaging with these questions, the article provides insight into how state oppression against Hindu women converting to Islam speaks to the forms of securitization and gendered Islamophobia present globally.

  • 3 The phrasing does not imply that the author is creating or endorsing the category; instead, I use t (...)

6The article argues that there are two key aspects in the relationship between the state and newly converted Muslim (formerly Hindu) woman. First, building on existing literature by feminist scholars, I argue that the state perceives the Hindu woman, who “becomes a Muslim woman” after her consensual interfaith marriage and conversion, as a victim who needs to be rescued from the devious Muslim man (Gupta 2023). Second, I also argue that the implementation of the UP anti-conversion law is exemplary of the intertwining between the personal process of “becoming” a Muslim woman and the public discourse of national security. This means that, on the one hand, Hindu women who, succumbing to familial and societal pressure, report their Muslim husbands to the authorities, are deemed to be victims who have been rescued (Tyagi and Sen 2020). On the other hand, Hindu women who go through the process of “becoming” a Muslim woman, are not only deemed to be naïve, but are also seen as potential threats to the state. The Indian state perceives the woman to be a victim, as well as an accomplice, in large-scale Islamist terror plots which could include joining the “Islamic State,” or contributing to the alleged outnumbering of Hindus in India. The article thus refers to the converted woman as the “new” Muslim woman because this “new” identity is socially constructed by the state and is reflected in the treatment by state institutions.3 The article concludes that, as long as the woman is a Hindu woman, the state views her as a victim of “love jihad,” but her “new” Muslim identity leads to her subsequent “securitization.”

7In this way, this study situates the “new” Muslim woman and the myth of “love jihad” within the discourse of security and gendered Islamophobia. This conceptualization is important because it understands the “new” Muslim woman not only as a passive victim but as an active agent creating a security threat to the “Hindu Rashtra” (nation). This foregrounds the point that anti-conversion legislation and the space extended to non-state actors, including vigilante groups, family and societal members, are not only instrumental to and/or epiphenomenal products of Hindutva politics, but are also part of the acts and techniques involved in the social construction of security in a modern state. This article thus adds to the feminist literature on conversion and Islamophobia, and broadens the scholarship on securitization in South Asia.

  • 4 In the districts of Kanpur, Allahabad, Mau, Lucknow, Bareilly, Shahjahanpur, and Bijnor.
  • 5 One case in Kanpur, Bijnor, Mau, and Shahjahanpur. Three of the four cases include Hindu women marr (...)
  • 6 All interviews took place in Hindi and Urdu, with some in English where it was the preferred langua (...)
  • 7 Part of the fieldwork for this paper was carried out alongside journalist Sabah Gurmat and funded b (...)

8The analysis in the article is drawn from the field interviews I conducted in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh4 between December 2021 and June 2022 regarding four cases in UP of alleged forced interfaith marriage and conversion.5 I conducted 50 open-ended, semi-structured interviews with the following persons involved in the cases:6 the “new” Muslim women, the accused men and their family members, the women’s family members who filed the cases, district court judges, district court advocates, and civil and women’s rights activists.7 The documentary sources that were collected and analyzed include: case documents such as First Information Reports (FIRs) and charge sheets, when they had been filed, women’s testimonies that had been submitted under section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Allahabad High Court bail orders, fact-finding reports, the writ petition at Allahabad High Court, and regional and national media reports. The article also delves into an analysis of the film The Kerala Story to highlight, through a securitization lens, the entwinement of gendered Islamophobia with domestic Hindutva politics. An analysis of the film is integral to this article because it represents the popular culture adaptation that takes place against the backdrop of the growing anti-conversion cases registered, but not tried, and is thus relevant to the construction of the securitized “new” Muslim woman.

9This article is structured as follows. It first provides an overview of the relevant literature on anti-conversion within the feminist and Hindutva discourse. This section also introduces the concepts of securitization and gendered Islamophobia within the “love jihad” context in India. It is followed by a case study analysis that highlights my theoretical contributions. The article ends with a set of conclusions.

Anti-conversion, gendered Islamophobia and security

10Marriage within all religious communities in India is a sacrosanct union dictated by the family; it symbolizes the handing over of a woman, by and with the approval of the male head of the family, to another man (Agnes 2012). Interreligious marriage has thus traditionally been considered to be an anti-society issue, and a matter that brings “disgrace” and “utmost shame” on the family. State opposition to converting to another religion has a long history in India. Several scholars working on caste and conversion highlight the colonial conceptualization of contemporary anti-conversion laws, which question the “authenticity” of proselytization based on the assumption that these are primarily rooted in external influence, not in free will (Hardiman 2006; Sarkar 2001). Historically, groups like Dalits and tribals were infantilized and disavowed of agency and rightful choice in their religious conversion through a paternalistic discourse that indicated that individuals do not convert to a new faith, but are “converted by others”, under wrongful conditions or for material gains (Viswanath 2014). The anti-conversion laws implemented since the 1960s therefore have their roots in preexisting ideas about the infantilization of Dalits, women and tribals as well as in nineteenth-century Hindu revivalism (Selvaraj 2024). Over the last decade, BJP-led governments have modified these laws to add a marriage clause and to implement them in a larger number of states.

11Scholars argue that present-day legal, political and social practices of the anti-conversion law have served in the past as instruments of morality and regulation, asserting control over the choice and mobility of women (Tyagi and Sen 2020). Historical analyses find parallels between the contemporary “love jihad” issue and the 1920 Arya Samaj campaign about alleged “abductions” and conversions of women to Islam (Gupta 2009). While, in the past groups of Hindu vigilantes were particularly active at railway stations by keeping an eye out for interfaith couples, in contemporary India their networks of local informants among staff at restaurants and cyber cafes are bolstered by law-backed advocates and state-backed police personnel. A historical analysis of the anti-conversion campaign suggests that certain imagined common narratives repeated throughout history have created mutual tension in different circumstances, but the difference now lies in the institutionalization of the law by a Hindutva state (Gupta 2009). According to historian Charu Gupta, this law is intended to control the “bedding and wedding” of Hindu women in order to “discipline and infantilize” them. Hindutva anxieties emerge from the consensus that women are incapable of exercising the right choice in love, without community—and increasingly state—approval (Gupta 2021).

12The feminist reading of interfaith marriage and religious conversion foregrounds the ways converted women transgress Hindutva understandings of “women’s sexuality, needs and desires” (Uma and Saxena 2021). Scholars propose that Hindu women use instruments of elopement and conversion to challenge the oppressive social order, and to reclaim their agency, albeit within a limited scope of independent action (Gupta 2009). Studies that examine the lived realities of women found that, in cases of interfaith marriage, women’s consent is doubted, questioned, and revoked by both family members and state agents. The misuse of criminal law by family members in the case of interfaith and intercaste marriage, by lodging false complaints of abduction and sexual assault, among other charges, has been widely documented by feminist law researchers and data journalists (Shrinivasan 2021; Uma 2012). Feminist scholars have also found that the police and the district judiciary in parts of northern India have exercised their powers to uphold the father’s patriarchal authority over the daughter in interfaith elopements (Chakravarti 2005).

13As pointed out by academics, collusion between familial and state patriarchy runs parallel to the rise of state-sponsored religious fundamentalism in South Asia. In India, the imperative in religious movements to control and to direct women’s public work, and their choices in fertility and their sexuality are rooted in the state’s patriarchal interests (Chhachhi 1989). Thus, campaigns to educate young girls, and special vocational programs to develop women’s skills, which weaken familial patriarchal control over them, are superimposed by a religious patriarchy that has an ideological justification in reasserting controls through state laws that are aimed at preserving traditions and the tenets of the majority religion (Chhachhi and Pittin 1999). Feminists have also posited that for women’s rights in India, the distinction between private and public has been erased because the community and family jurisdiction is just as invasive as that of the state, with the former intensifying in the private daily interpersonal sphere, and the latter building on the former through the coercive and patriarchal state machinery (Sangari 1995). The anti-conversion law thus serves as another item in the parental and state tool kit that the legal system provides disapproving families and vigilante groups with.

  • 8 Notwithstanding the question of forced religious conversion of Hindu women through marriage to Musl (...)

14The anti-conversion discourse in the South Asian context has thereby formed a key site for the mobilization of the religious-nationalist ideology8 of Hindutva in India, or of Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar and Sri Lanka (Malji 2021). A large body of work demonstrates how Hindu nationalism is implicitly gendered and deploys a certain imagery of both Hindu and Muslim woman as symbols of community identity (Basu 1993). The Hindutva ideology, in its militant form is deeply entrenched in the Hindu woman, a woman who is not feebleminded or homebound but has a strong body and preys on “predatory Muslim men”, as seen in traditional figures of the Hindu Goddesses Kali and Shakti (Sarkar 2002; Sethi 2002). At the same time, Hindu women are perceived as naïve, pure and innocent, the central Hindutva trope revolving around the idea of the hypersexual Muslim man preying on them (Gupta 2009). On the other hand, the idea of the Muslim woman is twofold: she is simultaneously a victim of Islamic patriarchy—from which the Hindu male has to rescue her—and a collaborator with her male co-religionists (Bacchetta 2004; Hasan 1993; Hasan and Menon 2004).

15Nationalists portray the woman’s body as being representative of the “honor” of the nation, which risks being violated by devious Muslim men (Chatterjee 2019; Hasan and Menon 2004). Indian investigative journalism websites Cobrapost and Gulail found active “conversion counselling centers” and “Hindu Helplines” run by Hindutva groups, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and even women’s groups such as the Durga Vahini, in places ranging from Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh to Ernakulam in Kerala (Kumar 2015). An investigation found that these centers brainwash Hindu women who have married Muslim men, feeding them reasons such as: “If we hadn’t brought you here somehow or the other at night with your brother… you might see it as cruel, but to me it isn’t cruel… there is no violence towards you. When we put you in an ambulance… We feel sad but we have to do this right now. If we have to fight a war, soldiers will get killed. If we don’t fight, our nation will lose the war” (Kumar 2015).

16Leaving aside feminist literature on the issue of conversion, academic scholarship on the genealogy of conversion in India situates strong anti-conversion elements within the struggle for state sovereignty, which has been performed in legal, political, and religious-cultural spheres. According to Osuri (2013), anti-conversion campaigns in pre- and postcolonial contexts can be viewed as biopolitical acts of sovereign power. Therefore, “love jihad” is a direct threat to the sovereignty of the state, as is evident in the logic put forward by proponents of the anti-conversion campaign. In the Cobrapost investigation, the BJP member of the Legislative Council, Captain Ganesh Karnik, interviewed in Mangalore, said that: “‘love jihad’ is a conspiracy by Muslims to increase their numbers” in order to “convert India into an Islamic state” (Kumar 2015). One of the organizers of the Hindu Helpline, Mr Cijith, told Cobrapost about conversion allegedly being an “international agenda.” He said: “We create awareness in society. Don’t think of it as a single incident. It is part of an international conspiracy to create trouble (Kumar 2015). To expand on Osuri’s argument, if anti-conversion enactments are rooted in claims to sovereignty and the construction of Hindu nationalist norms, then the men and women accused of illicit conversions via marriage can be considered as threats to state sovereignty. While it is widely proclaimed that Muslim men are part of an inside and outside conspiracy to “lure and convert” Hindu women in order to weaken the nation, the women involved are almost always framed as playing the role of a “naïve, unsuspecting target” (Gupta 2021).

17The concept of “gendered Islamophobia,” specific to Hindu nationalism, is relevant in a global context of the instrumentalization of Muslim women in the discourses of the extreme right. The concept of Islamophobia specific to the Hindutva ideology is a relatively recent incarnation of long-standing anti-Muslim hatred and discrimination in India (Kaul and Menon 2024; Saeed 2024). The scholarship on Islamophobia is predominantly Euro-American centric, and few studies acknowledge discriminations that are based not only on skin color but also on perceived sociocultural characteristics outside the West, including discriminations that do not involve Euro-American perpetrators (Modood and Sealy 2022). Jasmine Zine, who coined the term “gendered Islamophobia,” defined it as: “specific forms of ethno-religious discrimination leveled at Muslim women that proceed from historically contextualized negative stereotypes that inform individual and systemic forms of oppression” (2006). A project set up to combat Islamophobia, Justice for Muslims Collective, reported that “gendered Islamophobia consists of the ways that the state utilizes gendered forms of violence to oppress, monitor, punish, maim, and control Muslim bodies” (Raja and Justice for Muslims Collective 2019). Scholarship on gendered Islamophobia has mostly focused on Muslim women as a minority in Western contexts, and little has been written about Muslim women, or Hindu women who convert to Islam, within South Asian contexts (Malji 2021). By introducing the concept of gendered Islamophobia, within the discourse of conversion, my article posits that certain forms of state violence are specific to Hindu women who choose to “become” Muslim women.

18Gendered Islamophobia provides an important lens through which to view the forms of familial and state oppression and violence directed toward newly converted Muslim women which lie at the intersection of sexism and Islamophobia. Within the Indian context in particular, anti-Muslim views are historically entrenched in Hindutva ideological and discursive processes, building on the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan, as well as historical Muslim rule in parts of north India. In the case of the “love jihad” law, the gendering of this Hindutva-specific Islamophobia is heightened through systemic and institutional actions, as well as by non-state actors, such as vigilante groups—which, when mobilized, fuel violence through hate—, community members and institutions, and via family and interpersonal relationships. The promulgation of the anti-conversion law under the BJP state reveals the way in which state agents foster an environment of impunity that encourages the spread of hateful narratives, and the use of gendered violence and discrimination by state agencies. It also allows intracommunity abuse, verbal violence, familial violence, harassment, detention, torture, and for the social exclusion of women to flourish (Raja and Justice for Muslims Collective 2019). Though the gendering of Islamophobia affects women in such a way that they are looked upon as victims, this article suggests that there is also a “securitization” of converted women in the interest of state sovereignty.

19The disparity in these perspectives on conversion and anti-conversion lies in the understanding not only of patriarchal control of the state over women or the common interest of maintaining demographic majorities, but also of the dominance of narratives about national security interests. The securitization theory posits that by using a speech act, domestic political actors, vigilante groups and BJP ministers have enabled the transformation of a seemingly non-security-related issue, involving the private lives of citizens, into a national security concern (Malji and Raza 2021; Wæver 1995). With the myth of “love jihad” being constructed as a security threat, the Indian state is qualified as a “subject” of security, and Hindu women who convert as “objects” of security. Through political rhetoric and propaganda, securitization is used as justification by the state to enact often legal and extralegal measures in the interest of protecting the nation (Balzacq 2019). The implementation of the anti-conversion law, through the extension of legal and extralegal means, has challenged the notion that the policy is either gender-neutral or religion-neutral.

20Against this background of literature on conversion and women converts, the following section provides a brief analysis of the UP anti-conversion law.

The “love Jihad” law: mixing patriarchy with national security

21The UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act 2021 was promulgated by the UP governor as an ordinance on November 28, 2020, and subsequently became an Act on March 5, 2021 after approval by the state legislature (UP Legislature 2021). The law restricts individuals from converting to another religion by requiring prior permission from the government, in order to protect individuals from alleged forced conversions. The law therefore indirectly regulates interfaith marriage celebrated through a religious ceremony, despite the fact that this type of marriage used to be possible through the religious conversion of one partner.

  • 9 The cases accounted for here are those that had come to a close at the time this article was finish (...)

22Since the Hindutva myth of “love jihad” was codified into law, a number of cases have been filed. Between 2020 and 2023, UP police registered at least 424 cases (Image 1) against 1,229 people under the anti-conversion law, with Bareilly recording 86 cases, followed by Gorakhpur with 61 cases, and Lucknow with 55 cases (TNN 2023). The police reported to the press that 339 charge sheets had been filed, while the rest were still under investigation. Of all the cases registered, only three Muslim men have been convicted: in Amroha (2022), Mahoba (2023), Bulandshahr (2024) and Bareilly (2024)9; the first two were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment by district courts in Amroha and Mahoba, the third was sentenced to life imprisonment under the Scheduled Castes/Tribes Atrocities Act and the anti-conversion law, and the fourth, in Bareilly, was sentenced to life imprisonment (OpIndia Staff 2024; Scroll Staff 2024; Singh 2023; Upadhyay 2022).

  • 10 Case number 1046/2022 Uttar Pradesh versus Aamir Khan, son of Khalid Khan (207/2022).

23Though the conviction rate is low, several investigations have found that the period for which an accused man is held behind bars, even before the investigation begins, can extend to two years, thus ensuring that the two partners have no contact with each other. In a rare case dating back to September 2022, in which the accused was eventually acquitted of conversion charges by the sessions court in Shahjahanpur, the Muslim man, Aamir Khan, had been in jail for five months.10 The court noted the interference of communal organizations, stating that the Hindu woman “was forced to file a false complaint after pressure from religious organizations and fear of religious contractors” who had also “written her statement.”

Image 1

Image 1
  • 11 A Commissionerate is the part of a district that is under the control of a police commissioner.

Data released by UP government, image from Times of India (TNN 2023).11

24The UP anti-conversion law provides legal protection for Hindu women and is not only a product of historical patriarchies and Hindu nationalism, but also a national security program. Section 4 of the law grants power to the woman or any family member “related to her by blood, marriage or adoption,” to lodge a first information report (FIR) regarding alleged forced conversion (UP Legislature 2021). In practice, however, FIRs were often filed by individuals unrelated to the woman after and by the mobilization of several individuals including an advocate, policeman, members of Hindutva groups, along with the woman or a family member.

25In my study of 20 FIRs filed throughout UP in 2020 and 2021, the formal complaint repeatedly concerned a Muslim man lying about his religious identity and thereby forcing the victim (Hindu woman) to convert to his religion. Should the woman fail to convert, he would “leak illicit photos and videos” of the woman to bring shame upon her, or worse “kill her and her family members”. In all FIRs, the woman is consistently represented as a passive victim upon whom conversion and marriage has been forced. The complaint follows a standard template and appears to be copied and pasted across numerous FIRs in different districts. There are similar phrasings and coincidences used in all of them, such as the man “used a Hindu name,” “befriended the women,” “did bad things,” “clicked obscene photos,” “stole money and jewelry from her house,” and “forced her to pray namaz and eat beef.” In several FIRs, the man is accused of “abducting and raping” the woman and threatening to “sell her off.”

  • 12 According to the Code of Criminal Procedure, a non-cognizable offence is one that requires permissi (...)

26The consequences of a FIR can be immediate arrest and imprisonment under the non-cognizable and non-bailable act.12 While it has been portrayed as a well-intentioned law enacted for the protection of women against any malicious, religious conversion, the law invariably gives disgruntled family members the power to intervene in the woman’s choice of husband, allegedly for her own protection. In my study of bail orders generated by UP district courts and Allahabad High Court, I found that the men accused under this act had been jailed for periods between three to eighteen months because lower courts generally refused bail on the grounds that, were the accused to be granted bail, he could potentially “intimidate and threaten the witnesses and destroy the evidence.”

27In keeping with the legal language of other anti-conversion laws in India, the UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act 2021 does not use or define the words “love jihad” in any of its provisions (UP Legislature 2021). In multiple instances, the Supreme Court, as well as high courts in several states, has ruled in favor of interfaith marriage, noting the lack of evidence of any “love jihad” conspiracy. For instance, in the Shafin Jahan versus Asokan K. M. (2018) case, K. M. Asokan, father of the newly converted Muslim woman Hadiya Jahan (formerly Hindu and known as Akhila Asokan), accused his daughter’s Muslim husband, Shafin Jahan, of committing forced religious conversion and marriage. In May 2017, Kerala High Court dismissed Hadiya/Akhila’s testimony which stated that she had married Shafin Jahan of her own free will. The court annulled their marriage, stating: “A girl aged 24 is weak and vulnerable, capable of being exploited in many ways” (Express Web Desk 2018; Merchant 2022). The Supreme Court reversed the Kerala High Court ruling and observed: “The Kerala High Court, as is noticeable from the impugned verdict, has been erroneously guided by some kind of social phenomenon that was frescoed before it” (Supreme Court of India 2018). The absence of a legal definition of “love jihad” was also confirmed by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. The Union home ministry provided a written response to a question in the Lok Sabha by Congress leader, Benny Behanan, stating: “The term ‘Love Jihad is not defined under the extant laws. No such case of ‘Love Jihad’ has been reported by any of the central agencies” (Ministry of Home Affairs 2020).

  • 13 Chhattisgarh adopted the 1968 anti-conversion law of its parent state Madhya Pradesh.
  • 14 Arrests and charges made under this law are justified under sections 3 and 5(1) of this Act.

28Despite the absence of a legal definition of the expression “love jihad,” section 3 of UP’s Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act restricts religious conversion undertaken for interfaith marriage (UP Legislature 2021). By including terms that are open to a broad interpretation such as, “marriage” and “convincing,” the law automatically makes interfaith marriage via religious ceremonies “unlawful.” These new amendments, including the marriage clause, make the UP law distinct from anti-conversion laws in Odisha (1967) and Chhattisgarh (1968)13—the first of such laws. By including “marriage” as incriminating grounds for religious conversion, the law essentially illegalizes interreligious marriage that is not registered under the Special Marriage Act. Section 5(1) of the act, specifies that punishment for contravening section 3 includes imprisonment for between one and five years and a fine of 15,000 rupees or more (UP Legislature 2021).14 The law imposes longer prison terms and bigger fines for those accused of converting or abetting the conversion of women, children or individuals belonging to Scheduled Castes or Tribes, thereby introducing more severe punishment for crimes against the “weakest” sections of society. The law thus criminalizes the converter, not the converted, disclosing the infantilization and paternalistic assumptions that underlie it.

29The paradox in the law lies in the fact that it also legalizes the reconversion of the individual to their previous religion (presumably Hinduism). This means that women abandoning the Hindu fold are assumed to be under “external influence,” but the act of returning to a faith is interpreted as religious freedom and choice. Thus, even if similar means, such as “convincing, alluring, coaxing, marrying, or abetting,” are used in the process of reconversion, which is commonly the case, these would not qualify as unlawful.

30Taking into account the contrarian characterization, on the one hand, of women converts as “lured, convinced and coaxed,” and, on the other hand, of women converting back to their own religion as volitional, the following section provides an analysis of four cases of alleged forced conversion, and an evaluation of the social life of the “love jihad” law and its impact on the construction of the women’s identity.

“New” Muslim women: from victims to security threats

  • 15 While the case studies in this article refer to the names of the persons involved, all of them have (...)

31This section analyzes a wealth of empirical material from the four cases, documenting the effect of the anti-conversion law on constructing a securitized identity of the “new” Muslim woman through her relationship with the state. The cases15 and FIRs examined for this research, and in which women had voluntarily converted to Islam or Hinduism in order to marry their Muslim or Hindu partner, were found to be the consequences of familial or societal pressure, and/or of mobilization by vigilante groups. This finding is common to other investigations. In August 2021, UP police in Kanpur set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to investigate 14 cases of alleged forced interreligious conversion through marriage. The SIT found that, in eight cases, Hindu women consensually lived with or married Muslim men, while the remaining cases were still under investigation (Rashid 2020). The news agency Newslaundry scrutinized the cases and found them to be “riddled in inconsistencies.” Seven of the cases were reported to contain false allegations of coercion made by family members, while in three cases, the women deposed that their marriage was consensual and that they wished to live with their husbands (Kumar 2021).

32As in many cases of patriarchal violence, the women in these cases had suffered from familial violence, verbal and sometimes physical abuse, harassment, social exclusion, and confinement to the house. With the promulgation of the anti-conversion law in UP, the issue of religious conversion has been securitized by becoming disentangled from the political sphere of public contestation and debate, and has been turned into an issue of patriarchal disciplining and maintenance of law and order which involves police and vigilante groups (Malji and Raza 2021). Consequently, this section shows how the measures used against the woman convert are justified under the pretext of protecting the security not only of the woman but also of the religion, and by extension, the nation.

Outsourcing family paternalism to the state

33The first two case studies hereafter demonstrate patriarchal authority and the collusion between the family and the state in cases of “love jihad.”

Case 1: Mau, 2020

34In December 2020, Ayushi Verma, a 33-year-old Hindu woman eloped with Shabab Khan, a 38-year-old Muslim man who had worked as a driver for her family. A year later, with Shabab in jail accused of forcing Ayushi to convert to his religion, I interviewed his lawyer, friends, neighbors, and his family who had moved from their home in Mau because they were being harassed by their neighbors. According to Shabab’s family, the couple had been seeing each other for seven years, and they eloped two nights before Ayushi’s wedding to a Hindu man, which her family had arranged. Shabab’s district court lawyer informed me that Ayushi had “threatened to kill herself” if she were to be married to the Hindu “intended”, and that it was she who “begged to run away.” Following their elopement, they drove to Kolkata, where they celebrated their marriage through both a Hindu and Muslim religious ceremony. Shabab’s family told me that Ayushi’s father and brother reported the matter to the UP police, who assigned personnel to find them. His sister pointed out that Ayushi’s family had caste ties with one of the police officers, which thereby strengthened her family’s connections with Chiraiyakot police station. This proved to be a point of negotiation with the police, who devoted special attention to the case and colluded with Ayushi’s natal family to control her.

  • 16 Apart from section 3 and 5 of the UP anti-conversion law, the charges included in the FIR are to be (...)

35After two weeks of police inquiries, the couple were sighted in Kolkata, and the police traveled there to apprehend them. The police eventually caught them at the Jharkhand border, where they were on their way to a court to legalize their marriage and to seek protection. Based on the FIR filed by the Chiraiyakot police station in Mau, Shabab as well as 14 family members and friends across Mau and Kolkata were arrested and imprisoned under sections 3 and 5 of the UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, along with other charges of abduction and cheating (Gurmat 2022b).16 Like other anti-conversion FIRs, it claimed that Shabab used a Hindu name “Rahul” to “lure” Ayushi into marrying him and converting, by abducting her.

36Based on their Allahabad High Court orders, the 15 persons arrested were denied bail by the lower courts and spent periods of between 3 and 18 months in jail before being granted bail by the high court. In my interview with their high court advocate (who secured bail for them all), he said, “Shabab’s bail order took the longest. There was no relevant evidence against any of them, which is why they have been granted bail.”

37Neighbors and other people involved in the case reported that Ayushi had been under strict house detention, imposed by her family and that no one had seen her since the couple had been apprehended. I interviewed her family in their jewelry shop in a very strained atmosphere, but Ayushi’s brother, Pankaj, refused to allow me to speak to her. The discomfort and hostility in the room of the house, located at a corner of a very busy market, was palpable when Mr. Pankaj said that all was well, that Ayushi was happy with her life and would not want to speak to any researchers. One interviewee told me, “No one is allowed to speak to Ayushi; her family has coerced her into silence, and she is under a lot of pressure.” Another interviewee said, “Ayushi has been put under house arrest by her family.”

38As in this case, patriarchal authority over women is institutionalized by state agents who extend her family’s dominance through the enforcement of the anti-conversion law. Ayushi was silenced—leaving her bereft of agency—, through collaboration between state agents and her family. At the behest of the family and vigilante group members, the state’s relationship with the “new” Muslim woman convert is one of a patriarch, with the police retrieving the “tricked” daughter and placing her in her family’s custody. In Ayushi’s case, her family used the law to outsource paternalism to the state. To prevent the legal registration of the marriage, UP police traced the couple across states and returned the 33-year-old “victimized” Ayushi, to the “lawful custody” of her family.

39Similarly, the following case demonstrates the infantilization of an adult Hindu woman by her family and the state because she converted to Islam and married her Muslim partner.

Case 2: Shahjahanpur, 2021

  • 17 Her preferred name.

40Kafeel Ahmad, a 38-year-old Muslim man, who works for the local Samajwadi Party leader in Shahjahanpur, was accused of forcibly converting and marrying Vaishali Saxena, alias Iram Fatema, a 21-year-old Hindu Dalit woman. The couple had been seeing each other for some years, and had been married for one year when I interviewed them. I learnt from them that the incident began after they had had an argument, and Kafeel did not speak to Iram17 for a few days. During this period of silent treatment, Iram’s brother and his friends (who were members of the Hindu Yuva Vahini) convinced Iram to register a formal police complaint against Kafeel “to punish him.” Iram Fatema subsequently signed the documents that accused Kafeel of forced conversion and marriage.

  • 18 The Hindu Yuva Vahini (Hindu Youth Army) is a militant Hindu nationalist group created in 2002 in G (...)

41Based on media reports, Iram’s brother alleged that Kafeel and his accomplices had tricked and forced her to convert to Islam and to marry Kafeel (Singh 2020). During my interview with Kafeel, he told me that members of the vigilante group Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV)18 were friends with Iram’s brother and together they orchestrated a protest. The HYV mobilized a crowd of about 600 people that gathered outside Kotwali police station to protest against Kafeel’s alleged “love jihad.” A local civil rights activist whom I interviewed described the way in which the state stepped in at the behest of the Hindu vigilante group. He said that under pressure from the HYV, the police filed an FIR against four men, including Kafeel, with charges under sections 3 and 5 of the UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, assault, intimidation, and sections of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989.

42During my interview with Iram, a fearless young woman, she claimed that she had converted and married Kafeel of her own free will. She spoke to me at length about her family’s infantilization of her choices, and the ordeal involving threats, social isolation, and mental and physical violence inflicted on her by her family who had the support of the police. She said:

My brother told me, “Now your husband has walked out on you, so if you don’t register a case against him, where will you go? If you don’t file the case, we will not take you back home.” My brother thinks I am young and immature. When he brought me home, my family beat me up and forced me to levy this false case of conversion against my husband. I had to do it because who would help me? The police and [Hindu Yuva Vahini] protesters were with them. My brother also prevented me from meeting and talking to my husband for several months.

43Demonstrated here empirically, as other scholars have shown (Gupta 2009; Uma and Saxena 2021) are the ways in which the paternalistic relationship between state agents and the “new” Muslim woman plays out as the latter is perceived to be a naïve victim of forced conversion. The following subsection provides insight into the securitization and gendered Islamophobia she faces in the process of “becoming” a Muslim woman.

Gendered security-centric Islamophobia

44The four cases selected (the two described above and the two that follow) are characterized by the coercion and control levied by family and community members over women who tried to exercise agency by choosing interfaith marriage. The hyper-securitization of Islamic conversion through marriage has also led to the securitization not only of the man, but also of the woman convert. This is through the state’s construction of women not only as victims, but also as “objects” of security. In an interview with an advocate who routinely represents women’s families in cases involving interfaith marriage, he told me: “not all these women can be rescued… Some are out of hand, and they join the Muslim men… They are those who eat nonveg [nonvegetarian food] and are mixed with the men…they get involved in converting others as well…in fact they become more dangerous.”

45These Hindutva tropes used for Muslim men are also extended to the identity of the “new” Muslim women, who are no longer limited to being naive victims. They become subjects of gendered Islamophobia, deserving of negative stereotypes assigned to their male counterparts. The subsequent control over women’s choices in these cases is not only a result of traditional patriarchy, but also a mix of security concerns and gendered Islamophobia.

  • 19 Anonymized for the sake of privacy.

46According to the founders of a not-for-profit organization19 that facilitates interreligious and intercaste marriage, certain interfaith weddings do in fact take place in UP. They note that it may be possible for a Muslim woman to marry a Hindu man, but it is difficult for it to work the other way round. This is due to the fact that the police outsource control over women to vigilante groups. In an interview, the founders said:

It is almost impossible for a Hindu woman to marry a Muslim man in Uttar Pradesh. If a Hindu woman, marrying a Muslim man, goes to the police to seek protection from her family and any vigilante group attacks, they [the police] will tip off right-wing groups of the interfaith relationship. It is also not an uncommon practice for the police in UP, among other states, to pay a visit to the woman’s home to inform her parents and exert influence to put an end to the alliance.

47The following case illustrates this observation.

Case 3: Kanpur, 2021

48This incident began with a formal complaint against a 30-year-old Muslim taxi driver, Naushad (known only by his first name), for allegedly forcing his 28-year-old Hindu wife, Sapna Rajput, to convert to Islam. Six months after the complaint, I interviewed the couple, two women’s rights activists, and a political party representative in Kanpur. Reconstituting the narrative from media reports, my interviews and the FIR lodged against Naushad under the anti-conversion law, I found that the couple had been married for eight years and had three children. One night, when Naushad returned home drunk, the couple got into a fight over a neighbor’s complaint about their young daughter. A police constable, known to the neighbors as Chintu and living in the locality, intervened in the fight and beat up Naushad to “protect” Sapna Rajput.

49According to Sapna, her neighbors had taunted and abused her for marrying a Muslim man, and had subsequently convinced her to register a police complaint against him. A working woman with a mind of her own, Sapna runs a flower stall outside the local temple in Kanpur. She told me that advocate Pankaj Tiwari, known to her as a “local BJP leader,” was brought in by constable Chintu to draft a complaint against Naushad for forcing his wife to convert. During an interview, she told me about other “local BJP leaders,” namely Sanjay Mishra and Archana (surname unknown) who accompanied the advocate, and how they had coerced she and her daughter both into signing the complaint.

50Following the filing of an FIR, Naushad was arrested by Pheel Khana police under sections 3 and 5(1) of the UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act 2021, along with other charges (Gurmat 2022a). As in other complaints, the FIR claims that Naushad had concealed his Muslim name and identity for several years and went by the alias “Raj Thakur,” which is how Sapna had allegedly been “tricked” into marrying him, believing that he was a Hindu. In my interview with Naushad who was out on bail at the time, and against whom charges of forced conversion were later dropped, he said, “Chintu the constable, along with other neighbors, beat me up and then they persuaded my wife to file a case of forced conversion against me.”

51Sapna told me about the kinds of verbal abuse she was subjected to by members of her locality and Bajrang Dal. These people problematized her, not as an innocent woman who had made a mistake by marrying a Muslim man and needed rescuing, but as a “bad apple” who was to be blamed for such an act.

The Mohalla [locality] people and Bajrang Dal people…pressured me to sign on the false complaint…that they had written. Chintu and others blamed me and asked me why I married a Muslim man? They taunted me and said that women like me are the problem…the bad apples. They riled me up in the name of Hindu dharma [religion] and convinced me to go against my husband.

52Sapna was thus assumed to have the agency to marry Naushad, despite having gone against her coreligionists. Nevertheless, she could be returned to them under the patriarchal auspices of the vigilantes and undo her wrongs in the “name of religion,” by accusing her husband of forced conversion. He would thereafter be handed over to the patriarchal police for them to deal with. In this way, the Hindutva narrative woven into the issue of interfaith unions perceives the latter to be aberrant from and unlawful in a homogenous Hindu society, which is threatened by women who enter this type of marriage, and are therefore seen as threats, problems or “bad apples.” This form of gendered Islamophobia operates in a different way from the same phenomenon in Europe; in India, it justifies—under the guise of national security—the demonization not only of Muslim men but also of “new” Muslim women. The next subsection illustrates gendered Islamophobia through a securitization lens.

The state as a selective savior

53The construction of the identity of the “new” Muslim woman is also encapsulated in a comparison of the state’s treatment of women, when the man or the woman changes religion. In my fieldwork, I found that the police seem to be helpful in cases where Muslim women marry Hindu men. The following case illustrates this point:

Case 4: Bijnor, 202020

  • 20 Since this case was not reported in the media, for the purpose of this article, the name of the dis (...)
  • 21 Her preferred name.

54This case stands out because it had not been reported in any regional or mainstream media. This is because the anti-conversion law had not been imposed and the case hadn’t triggered any Hindu nationalist mobilization. The case concerns Zainab Ansari, alias Sonia Kumar, an 18-year-old Muslim woman who eloped and married Arjun Kumar, a 21-year-old Hindu Dalit man. I came across this case in my interviews with the lawyers at Bijnor District Court, and was introduced to the families of both Sonia21 and Arjun Kumar through advocates in Bijnor. In my meeting with Sonia, a sharp-witted woman, readily standing up to her parents, she told me that she and her partner used to be neighbors and had been seeing each other for several years before they decided to get married. She told me that she was defiant and firm:

My parents were against my relationship with Arjun, and they would never have agreed for me to marry him. I had no choice but to run away with him to make our marriage happen—it is my life after all. In response, they tried to register a case of unlawful conversion against Arjun for ‘forcibly’ converting me to Hinduism. This is not true, as I have converted and married him out of my own choice. But they have imposed false charges of abduction and theft of money against Arjun and his four friends who had helped us elope.

55According to her Muslim parents, whom I interviewed at their home in the same locality, their daughter Zainab was abducted and converted by the Kumars. When I interviewed their lawyer at Bijnor District Court, he said that the parents wanted to file a case of forced religious conversion, but the police refused to register it, and instead only opened a case of abduction and theft. Arjun Kumar told me that he has his family’s backing, and he spoke about how the couple had eloped and been to a court in Allahabad to register their marriage and thus safeguard their marital union. The lawyers told me that, following the parents’ official complaint, the police found the couple but instead of arresting the man—which is standard paternalistic action on the part of the police in these cases—they helped the couple to return safely to their home in Bijnor.

56In this case, where the woman was Muslim and the man Hindu, the police refused to file a case of forced conversion and ensured the couple’s safety both in Allahabad and when back in Bijnor. The Muslim woman’s “becoming” Hindu was neither perceived as a threat, nor was she portrayed as a naïve victim of a honey trap; in fact, she was a woman full of agency, who married the man of her choice and was now being hounded by her parents. The police were reported to have supported this woman in upholding her rights to marry the man of her choice. Furthermore, when I interviewed an organization working with interfaith couples, they said, “provided that the man is Hindu, it is possible to solemnize the interreligious union.” In one of the cases overseen by the organization, the girl was a Bengali Muslim and the boy was a Hindu from Lucknow. The organization advised the couple to go to the superintendent (SP) of the police and to inform him/her about their actions in order to seek protection. The SP took the girl to a safe house for women (Nari Niketan). The founder of the organization told me that the police cooperated with the couple and facilitated their marriage:

It was important to inform the police in case the parents filed an FIR for a missing person. If this had happened, then the investigating officer would take the girl for a medical examination, and then take her to her home district, and take her statement under section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The couple could dare to do this only since the girl was Muslim. If the girl was Hindu, the police would inform the Bajrang Dal and other Hindu organizations, as seen in many districts.

  • 22 Also seen in the case of the triple talaq law.

57In such cases, the security of the women of the “other” community is readily assumed to be a responsibility of the state. The selective treatment by the state as a “savior,” based on the religion of the woman, demonstrates the protection offered to Muslim women, who are otherwise considered to be victims of Muslim men and Islam.22 This is also a legitimized form of “Ghar-Wapsi [returning home],” a Hindu nationalist campaign for the religious conversion of non-Hindus to Hinduism, which is considered to be the “ancestral” religion of the people of India. A sociopolitical movement, the ghar wapsi campaign, also seen as a “Shuddhi” [purification] of lower castes, receives tacit support from state officials.

58In another incident concerning a Muslim woman eloping with her Hindu male partner, three policemen brought the burqa-clad Muslim woman to the judge’s chambers in Bijnor. As I sat there in conversation with the judge, the police officer reported to the district judge that the woman had voluntarily run away with her Hindu Dalit partner. The policemen appeared to be pleased with themselves in their quest to “protect” the Muslim woman and to chaperone her to the judge’s chambers to serve as witness to her consensual conversion and marriage. The judge asked the woman if this were true and she agreed, in almost a whisper, that she wanted to be with the man. She said, “My family is against our interfaith union, which is why we had eloped, and are requesting the court for protection.” The judge then signed the order and asked for the man to be discharged from police custody.

59However, the three Hindu women cited in cases herein, who chose to marry men outside their religion and refused to “fall in line” after they had been apprehended, did not encounter the same fate. They were deemed by the state and their families to be not only “victims,” but also devious co-participants. In one of the cases, a Hindu woman whom I interviewed told me: “on occasion, some of my neighbors use their caste-pride to taunt me and yell slurs. They would speak about me and say, ‘This one can’t be trusted; she has become a Mohammadan [slur against Muslims] and is one of them.’”

60In this way, the state selectively victimizes and securitizes women, thereby constructing “new” Muslim identities.

Securitization: the state and popular culture

61As seen in the previous subsection, “new” Muslim women are construed as security threats by vigilante groups, the police and community members. This is backed up by elites, state institutions and popular culture. By linking interfaith marriage to an international conversion conspiracy, the chairperson of the National Commission for Women, Rekha Sharma, told the press that her “detailed enquiry into love jihad” found that, “women are forcefully taken to different countries in the name of love jihad and are used as sex objects” (Aga, Shaji, and Choudhury 2021; ANI 2020).

62As a consequence of narratives being repeated and carefully propagated by political elites and policymakers, the “love jihad” issue has been securitized and brought under the purview of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) which functions as the Central Counter Terrorism Law Enforcement Agency in India. According to its website, the NIA came into existence after the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai and is empowered to deal with the investigation of terror-related crimes that have national and international implications, specifically focusing on terrorism, insurgency, and threats to the sovereignty, security, and integrity of India. In 2018, the NIA conducted an inquiry into 89 cases of interreligious marriage in Kerala. The investigation concluded that there was no master plan for the religious conversion of Hindu women, and that complaints could be attributed to the souring of personal and filial relationships (The Wire Staff 2018). However, the involvement of the NIA in cases of interfaith marriage is indicative of the construction and transformation of the issue of religious conversion in India, from one at a personal and familial level to that of a national security breach.

63The widespread securitization of “new” Muslim women in popular culture in India is further exemplified and illustrated by an analysis of the film The Kerala Story. The film is directed by Vivek Agnihotri and was released in multiple languages across India in May 2023. It is a fictionalized drama, claiming to be based on the true story of three women in Kerala, who had been manipulated and brainwashed into converting to Islam, and eventually joining the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Promoted by the ruling BJP and lauded by the prime minister, the film became the second most profitable Indian produced film in India in 2023 (Bhavsar 2023). Prime Minister Narendra Modi drew a link between cross-border terrorism and interfaith marriage between Hindu women and Muslim men when he said: “terrorism has taken a new form now. Apart from using weapons and bombs, they are working towards making society hollow from inside-out. The Kerala Story movie has exposed this new face of terrorism. The movie The Kerala Story is trying to expose the consequences of terrorism in a society” (Thadhagath 2023).

64As seen in this statement from the highest state office, the film is not only representative of the political rhetoric of Hindutva ideology, but it also provides language for the imaginations of “new” Muslim women who are a security threat. The film is narrated in the first person by a “new” Muslim woman, who claims to have been indoctrinated by Islamist fanatics. She was trafficked to Syria as an ISIS terrorist along with two other women, one of whom committed suicide, while the other was brutally raped in both conscious and unconscious states. Rather than centering on the terror plot, the film focuses on the means and the consequences of the luring and radicalization of newly converted Muslim women, thereby espousing the conspiracy of “love jihad.” BJP President J. P. Nadda held special movie screenings in Karnataka, and Member of Parliament Tejasvi Surya encouraged “young girl students of Bengaluru” to watch the film which “has a salient message for our young women” (The News Minute Staff 2023).

65Factual inaccuracy aside, the film has succeeded in cinematizing not only Hindutva anxieties about Hindu women’s honor and Muslim men’s fertility, but also nationalist arguments about terror activities. In this film, the issue of radicalization and recruitment by ISIS was not the prime focus; it was more the issue of the conversion of Hindu women to Islam via marriage. The Kerala Story is exemplary of the evolution of the sovereignty discourse where the construction of the identity of the “new” Muslim woman in the Hindu Rashtra (nation) is embodied by the masculine anxieties of the Hindu male. The BJP governments in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh backed the film’s narrative by making it tax-free for viewers (Sebastian 2023). The combination of domestic political fears of Muslim domination through foreign funding and of the perceived threat of transnational Islamist fundamentalism transforms Hindu female victimhood into securitized subjectivity. This is because the conversion and the “new” identity of the Muslim woman challenges the idea of the Hindu Rashtra and consequently the state’s legal and securitized response to that identity.

Conclusion

66To sum up, this paper examines the process through which the “new” Muslim woman—who recently converted to Islam in order to marry—is attributed a securitized identity. It argues that the processes affecting “new” Muslim women in India cannot be understood on their own as part of Hindu nationalism, but must be set in a broader context of the relationship between national security, patriarchal control over women, and gendered Islamophobia. This article thus provides insights into familial, societal, and state violence against Hindu women who convert to Islam in order to marry Muslim men; it adds to the literature on gendered Islamophobia and to securitization scholarship in South Asia.

67In keeping with the family values embedded in Hindu nationalism, the UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act 2021 is a legal translation of familial opposition to interfaith marriage, with the state replacing the family as the patriarch and codifying the regulation of Hindu women’s choices. Through the analysis of four case studies of alleged forced religious conversion, the article shows that, as a result of the promulgation of anti-conversion laws in multiple states across India, “new” Muslim women are perceived by the state as both victims and security threats influenced by patriarchal authority and layers of gendered Islamophobia.

68The concept of gendered Islamophobia has focused primarily on Muslim women in Western contexts; the article is one of the first analyses to investigate how gendered Islamophobia operates in India within the context of religious conversion. It shows that “becoming” a Muslim woman is a fraught process due to the change in the relationship between the state and the newly converted woman. The gendering of Islamophobia has thus led to women being reframed as security threats to the nation, by linking them to the Islamic State.

69Further research is needed to study the long-term consequences for women who return to their families. Questions remain about how women who are forcibly returned to their families cope with the situation after their return. Considering the “shame” and “threat” they are perceived to have brought upon their families, through what means and justifications does their remarriage to a Hindu man reintegrate them into the Hindu nation?

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Notes

1 The Bajrang Dal is a militant Hindu nationalist group that comprises the youth wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP).

2 At the time of writing this article, the BJP-led government in Rajasthan clarified its commitment to introduce a religious conversion law (Mohanty 2024). In Karnataka, in 2023, the then BJP-led government instated a law against religious conversion, which was later revoked by the Congress government (ET Bureau 2023). Arunachal Pradesh formulated its anti-conversion law in 1978, which has not been enacted. An anti-conversion bill passed in 2002 in Tamil Nadu was duly revoked after protests.

3 The phrasing does not imply that the author is creating or endorsing the category; instead, I use this expression only because this is how the state constructs and treats these women.

4 In the districts of Kanpur, Allahabad, Mau, Lucknow, Bareilly, Shahjahanpur, and Bijnor.

5 One case in Kanpur, Bijnor, Mau, and Shahjahanpur. Three of the four cases include Hindu women marrying Muslim men, while the fourth case in Bijnor concerns a Muslim woman converting and marrying a Hindu man. The fourth case is used to develop the analysis of the other three cases that are deemed “love jihad.”

6 All interviews took place in Hindi and Urdu, with some in English where it was the preferred language of the interviewee.

7 Part of the fieldwork for this paper was carried out alongside journalist Sabah Gurmat and funded by The Leaflet. The fieldwork was also funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

8 Notwithstanding the question of forced religious conversion of Hindu women through marriage to Muslim men in Pakistan.

9 The cases accounted for here are those that had come to a close at the time this article was finished, in October 2024.

10 Case number 1046/2022 Uttar Pradesh versus Aamir Khan, son of Khalid Khan (207/2022).

11 A Commissionerate is the part of a district that is under the control of a police commissioner.

12 According to the Code of Criminal Procedure, a non-cognizable offence is one that requires permission from a judicial magistrate for the arrest of the accused and the investigation of the case. A non-bailable offence denotes a serious crime for which the accused may not be entitled to bail.

13 Chhattisgarh adopted the 1968 anti-conversion law of its parent state Madhya Pradesh.

14 Arrests and charges made under this law are justified under sections 3 and 5(1) of this Act.

15 While the case studies in this article refer to the names of the persons involved, all of them have been anonymized in quotations. The names that have been revealed herein are of those cases that have been reported in the press and for which information is readily available. The article ensures that the interlocutors cannot be identified in their quotes and expressions, to ensure the confidentiality of their participation and to protect their identity.

16 Apart from section 3 and 5 of the UP anti-conversion law, the charges included in the FIR are to be found, among others, in sections 366 (abducting or inducing a woman to marry), 368 (confinement of an abducted person), 120B (criminal conspiracy), 420 (cheating in the delivery of property) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code.

17 Her preferred name.

18 The Hindu Yuva Vahini (Hindu Youth Army) is a militant Hindu nationalist group created in 2002 in Gorakhpur district by the current UP BJP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.

19 Anonymized for the sake of privacy.

20 Since this case was not reported in the media, for the purpose of this article, the name of the district where this incident occurred, and the names of the man and woman have been changed to protect their identity.

21 Her preferred name.

22 Also seen in the case of the triple talaq law.

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List of illustrations

Title Image 1
Caption Data released by UP government, image from Times of India (TNN 2023).11
URL http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/docannexe/image/9462/img-1.png
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References

Electronic reference

Nidah Kaiser, “New” Muslim Women and the Myth of “Love Jihad”: From Victims to Security Threats South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], 32 | 2024, Online since 10 October 2024, connection on 16 February 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/9462; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/136kd

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About the author

Nidah Kaiser

SOAS, University of London

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