An adult Hindu woman chooses to marry a Muslim boy. The personal law does not give her the full status of a wife as she is deprived of inheritance. It is only when she gives up her faith and stops worshipping idols and accepts Islam as her religion post-consummation of marriage that she will have entered into a valid marriage. Even though a Hindu woman wishes not to give up her faith she will have to do so in order to enter into a valid marriage and accept Islam as her faith. This will amount to forceful conversion. The position remains the same if a Hindu boy wants to marry a Muslim girl. The Hindu boy will have to accept Islam. Here, again there is an exercise of freedom of choice but there is a loss of dignity and the conversion is not exercised as a choice but on account of compulsion due to personal law intervening.
The above paragraph is an edited excerpt of one of the two illustrations of “forced conversion” submitted by the Yogi Adityanath-led government in Uttar Pradesh in the Allahabad High Court in August 2021. Seven months after the state government introduced a stringent new law against unlawful conversion, it submitted an affidavit in court in response to petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the law.
The document contained a second illustration of what the government described as forced conversion. It talked about a group of Christian missionaries visiting a Dalit busty to allure every member of the community with the promise that if they started believing in God or started reading the Bible, they would be provided with a free training course as a nurse and later a job in a hospital. The missionaries allure them to leave their faith based on these assurances. This amounts to a forceful conversion.
As evident in these examples, the new law against unlawful conversion brought in by the government was always intended to be used against Muslims and Christians, and additionally against Dalit Buddhists. The illustrations submitted by the government in court betray its prejudice and lay bare its intent behind bringing in such a law. In its eye, a Muslim and a Christian are the prototype offenders of unlawful conversion while a Hindu, more so a woman or a Dalit, is the likely victim.
Two years since the UP government brought in this contentious law, the FIRs lodged under it have clearly reinforced the above prejudice of criminality. Most of the accused and arrested persons are Muslim men while in some cases even Christians and Buddhists, especially from the Dalit and OBC communities, have been arrested on charges of unlawful conversion. This leaves no ambiguity that the law, which was introduced without any concrete data to back it, was politically motivated to harass minority communities or ideologies that challenge the grip of upper-caste Hindutva over the backward and Dalit castes.
There have been several facets to the implementation of this law, fitting with the Hindutva agenda of the ruling dispensation targeting further pulverising the dignity and security of Muslims. First, it involves the criminalization of inter-faith relationships and marriages involving Muslim men and Hindu women. The Hindu right refers to it as “Love Jihad,” a phrase not recognized legally. Second, the police have arrested Christians accusing them of trying to convert Hindus. Third, in several cases, police have booked members of the Dalit and OBC communities on charges of allegedly trying to convert people to Christianity. Four, it complicated the lives of inter-faith couples trying to get married as the law required them to submit a mandatory declaration form before the district magistrate 60 days prior to conversion. Five, the law has been used against “mass conversions”, with some cases even being probed from a national security angle.
However, politically, the law, which kills many birds with one stone, serves as the BJP’s instrument to deal with what it mischievously calls “Love Jihad” and to protect Hindu women. Backed by the propaganda in most of the media, the phrase has become synonymous with the unlawful conversion law even though it is not even mentioned in it nor does it represent the diversity of criminal allegations levelled under the law.
“Love jihad,” is a far-fetched conspiracy theory popularized by Hindu right-wing groups over the years as a communal slur for inter-faith marriages and relationships involving a Hindu woman and a Muslim man. According to this right-wing political campaign openly endorsed by the ruling BJP, including its chief ministers and top leadership, Muslim men allegedly work under a common design and conceal their identities to lure and seduce Hindu women with the intent of marrying them to convert their faith. In fact, in a public rally in Jaunpur a month before he introduced the law in 2020, Adityanath outlined the ideology behind it. While issuing a warning to those “who played with the honour” of “sisters and daughters” by concealing their identities, Adityanath said if they did not mend their ways, then their “Ram naam satya yatra (funeral processions)” would be taken out. The state cabinet in November 2020 gave its nod to the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2020, weeks after Adityanath had promised to bring an “effective law” against “love jihad.”
It later became an act after the state Assembly passed it. Of course, the draft of the law did not include the phrase “love jihad.” In February 2020, the Ministry of Home Affairs in a written reply in the Lok Sabha said the term “Love Jihad” was not defined under the “extant laws”.
The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021 makes religious conversion a cognisable and non-bailable offence, inviting penalties of up to 10 years in prison if found to be effected for marriage or through misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or other allegedly fraudulent means. As one can notice, the definition is agonizingly vague.
Violation of the provisions of the law would invite a jail term of not less than one year, extendable to five years, with a fine of ₹15,000. However, if a minor, a woman or a person belonging to the Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribes communities was converted through the said unlawful means, the jail term would be a minimum of three years and could be extended to 10 years with a fine of ₹25,000. In its election manifesto for the 2022 UP Assembly election, the BJP promised to increase the minimum punishment under the law to 10 years of imprisonment and Rs 1 lakh fine.
Ever since the law was enforced in the state, the police and administration have been in a hyper mode to criminalize inter-faith relationships especially involving Muslim men and Hindu women. In fact, such was the tearing hurry to implement the law that just a day after Governor Anandiben Patel promulgated it, police in Bareilly lodged the first case under it against a 21-year-old Muslim boy, an army aspirant, Uvaish Ahmad. He was arrested for allegedly trying to coerce a 20-year-old married Hindu woman to convert her to his religion and marry him. While Ahmad was booked under criminal intimidation, sections of the new ordinance were added to the printed FIR with a pen as the police system was not updated with the law.
Since then, the law has been used to harass couples and expose them to vigilantism. Take the case of a Dalit Hindu woman Pinki and her Muslim husband Rashid in Moradabad. In December 2020, Rashid and his brother were arrested under the law when they, along with Pinki, who was then pregnant, had reached the marriage registration office in Kanth, a town known for manufacturing gauze bandages, to get their marriage officially registered. Rashid, his brother and Pinki were handed over to the police by members of a Hindu right-wing outfit who opposed their marriage. They even heckled and shamed her. The police FIR was lodged on the complaint of Pinki’s mother, a resident of Bijnor, who accused Rashid of inducing and coercing her daughter into marriage to convert her. Rashid allegedly also concealed his Muslim identity from Pinki, her mother alleged. However, Pinki rubbished all allegations against her husband in front of the media and later in her statement before a magistrate. She stated that they had married in Dehradun in July 2020 through consent as both were adults. "I know the boy and what caste (community or religion) he belongs to. I know everything about him," Pinki had told Outlook then.
While police eventually dropped the case against Rashid and his brother, the episode proved to be a traumatic experience for Pinki and Rashid. After being forcibly handed over to police, Pinki was temporarily kept at a government-run women's shelter home where she reportedly suffered a miscarriage.
While the government is yet to officially release the current figures, a report by news agency ANI in November 2022, quoted an anonymous official as saying that in two years, police had arrested 507 persons in 291 cases of unlawful conversion. As per the detailed data shared by the government in court in August 2021, in the first 79 cases registered by police till July 2021, barring a handful, almost all were Muslim.
In Surajpur in Gautam Buddha Nagar, police had arrested four persons including three women – one of them a South Korean national, Minkaygali alias Anmol – on charges of using enticement to convert people to a different religion. The accused woman had alleged that the four had approached her during the COVID-19 lockdown and helped her with ration and money as she had no job or livelihood. However, she alleged that the accused later started inviting her to a temporary church in Malakpur every weekend, even sending a car to pick her up. She alleged they offered her more money and ration if she removed the images of Hindu gods and goddesses from her house. In another curious case, in September 2021, a Hindu Dalit man from Fatehpur Vijay Sonkar was arrested by police under the new anti-conversion law for trying to convert his Hindu wife to Islam.
The judiciary will decide the fate of the accused in specific cases — to date only one conviction has taken place under the new law in UP. However, what is undeniable is that the law has been used as a political instrument to intimidate a community and polarize opinion on communal lines.
Shashwat Anand, a lawyer in Allahabad High Court, who argued a PIL against the law in 2020 and 2021, says there has been a “landslide of reported cases of barbarous excesses at the hands of the police or vigilante mobs” since after passing of the law. “Such a law in the hands of our police (which is still governed by the Indian Police Act, 1861, modelled on the Irish colonial paramilitary police) is bound to become a weapon of harassment even against consenting couples/spouses. In such cases conversion is a concomitant of a valid marriage, ensuring benefits under the canopy of the respective personal law(s), namely, inheritance, maintenance, social acceptance, etc,” he said.
While for years, the Hindu right had been raising the bogey of Muslim men luring Hindu women for conversion, the groundwork for the new law started after the UP State Law Commission had in November 2019 submitted a report along with a draft legislation to the state government recommending a new law to regulate conversions and control conversions at the behest of fraud, inducement, allurement, coercion and those done for the sole purpose of marriage.
Justice (retired) Aditya Nath Mittal, chairperson of the state law commission who wrote the draft, had then told me that a law focused solely on the interfaith relationship between Hindus and Muslims would not stand the test of time. Therefore, the law had to be neutral and exclude the phrase “Love Jihad”.
Mittal now says the law was serving as a deterrent. "Earlier we would hear of 100 cases in a month, now we hear 2-4 cases in a month. It has put a stop on that,” he says. But Mittal acknowledges that “Love jihad” is not legal and not part of any legal standing. On being asked if the theory gets any legitimacy through this law, he says, "I have not used the word Love Jihad anywhere in this act because if we use Love Jihad, we would be making a law targetting a particular community, which we cannot do," said Mittal. However, there is nothing that stops politicians of the BJP from using the word or instigating social tension over it.
