Undeterred by repeated judicial pronouncements to the contrary, the Madhya Pradesh government seems to on a crusade against the so-called love jihad. On the other hand, the BJP led Karnataka government had announced early December it won’t bring the love-jihad legislation in the winter session. The announcement followed wide-spread criticism of the Yogi Adityanath government’s promulgation of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance, 2020 last month. This happened at a time when the Allahabad High Court overturned its earlier judgement that questioned a “conversion just for marriage.” To buttress its argument in favour of the ordinance, the UP government used the fig leaf of the earlier judgement that the Allahabad High Court subsequently overruled.
Whatever possibility of a rethink on the issue was there, it has been brushed aside and the cabinet of Shivraj Singh Chouhan government has cleared the deck for introducing the MP Dharm Swatantra Vidheyak 2020 (MP Freedom of Religion Bill) in the Assembly. Madhya Pradesh would be the second state after Uttar Pradesh to have such a law, once the Bill is passed in the Assembly. The MP government has even gone a step further and included in the Bill a provision for maintenance of the ‘victim’ of love jihad and her child. The burden of proof is on the accused and the crime will be cognisable and non-bailable.
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According to MP Home Minister Narottam Mishra, the Bill is stricter with longer terms of imprisonment. It will replace the Religious Freedom Act of 1968. Provisions have been made for the parents of the so-called victim or an organisation to register a complaint after which police will start an inquiry. If established that the marriage’s motive is religious conversion, it will be annulled. A child born of the annulled marriage will have the right to maintenance, expenses and inherit both paternal and maternal properties. Once a marriage is annulled, the converted person will be deemed to have returned to their paternal religion. It would be worthwhile to mention that the Hindoo religion does not permit inward conversion. That means a person of another faith, whether born in or converted to another religion, may not convert to Hindooism. It is for this very purpose and also to deter any overzealous Hindoo megalomaniac ruler from becoming aggressively conversion oriented that many sacred religious places, including the Lord Jagannath Temple at Puri, do not permit non Hindoos access to the premises. To be a Hindoo, one has to be born to Hindoo parents.
The MP Bill comes close on the heels of the Allahabad High Court’s observation on 18 December that a 21-year-old woman, who is married to a Muslim man, “has a choice to live her life on her own terms.” She has now been reunited with her husband. The Division Bench of Justices Pankaj Naqvi and Vivek Agarwal observed that since the woman has attained adulthood and has expressed her desire to live with her husband, “she is free to move as per her own choice without any restriction or hindrance being created by third party.”
The Allahabad High Court’s judgment is emphatic and the observation leaves no room for doubts about the supremacy of one’s freedom to choose one’s life partner. It is also a major step towards unshackling women from the age-old male domination that prevents them from choosing their spouse. It may be noted that the CJM Court of Etah, earlier in this case, had ordered the girl to be sent to a child care remand home without considering evidence of her age wherein she is an adult. The remand home, in turn, had turned the girl over to her parents. The observation of the HC Division Bench is also an indictment on the tendency of subordinate judiciary to bow to state governments to further political agenda.
Since the promulgation of the love jihad ordinance, UP police has, so far, arrested 35 persons and filed a dozen FIRs. The first case was registered in Bareilly just a day after the ordinance came into force.
The BJP is taking one step forward and two steps back on the love jihad legislation for obvious reasons. On the one hand, successive probes have failed to find any evidence that such a conspiracy exists and the Central government has admitted in Parliament that the term has no credible definition. On the other hand, the party desperately needs an issue to whip up communal sentiments to divert people’s attention from the Union government’s mismanagement of the country’s economic and defence affairs, as also the snowballing farmers’ agitation.
