Love for Jihad Or Jihad for Love

Heartily congratulations to the proud JNU Students Community who sternly rejected another heinous attempt by the regressive, hopeless and divisive forces in the campus, with an apparent support from outside, to malign the healthy, pluralistic, cordial and accommodative atmosphere of this prestigious campus through a couple of ill-intended, venomous and vitriolic pamphlets.

Accustomed to fish in the dirty water, self-assured or misguided that a call for flesh and blood of minorities are the best way to practice cultural nationalism and an eventual establishment of a Hindutva state, these desperadoes never deserve even a response to their heinous acts.

We have seen more of these in the past, witnessed its culminating orgasm in the post-Babri 90s, and have got assured that the majority Hindu brothers and minorities stand united to uphold a secular and democratic country, more concerned with its inclusive development.

However, as the entire target of this well-planned character assassination were a particular community, we, some concerned students thought to clear the air and do our part sincerely to avert any potential negative consequences of such dastardly efforts in vitiating the existing unity in diversity of our beloved campus.

In the immediate backdrop of such a sadistic ‘Sanghi Daharma’ exposure we see many things from the Sangh Parivar’s calamitous debacle in this year's election that indicated to a frightening desertion of the party by its general vote base of urban middle class as well as to the unending problems of the Sangh party due to an ageing and week leadership and vicious back-stabbings and in-fights, to a Remarkable erosion in the interest of parents to see their wards in the awkward and pre-modern kakki-knickers.

More importantly, the relentless attempts of Sangh mafia to paint the minority community black and to establish the ‘all-terrorists-are-Muslims’ theory through fake encounters and a number of dubious and mystery-shrouded attacks and explosions, obviously exploiting all the government machineries, were well exposed by the powerful secular forces of the country to the utter disappointment of these people. Now the Sangh is once again going back to its basis – evoke communal frenzy, spread hatred, divide the society through victimization and vilification of a particular community and seek the way to power.

The entire ‘Love-Jihad’ episode has underlined the ability of Sangh Parivar to spread a lie as truth and utilize it for fomenting communal violence. On first March, 2002, Gujarat’s Sandesh newspaper reported that a group of Godhra Muslims have abducted two young Hindu girls, raped them in turns, sliced their breasts and threw them in a nearby canal. The police force made an extensive search, investigated in detail, found that the entire story was cooked up to maximize the destructive effect of the ongoing post-Godra violence.

The newspaper later pretended apologizing through a three-line report, but all the intended damages were over by that time. The Sangh Pariwar spread the story all over Gujarat fanning the revenge and inducing their activists to employ the most heinous methods of killings, widespread rape, immolations of children and women and even taking out of fetus from the womb of a pregnant woman. Now we see the same people spreading some imagined stories sexed-up by their counterparts in Kerala.

Love inside and outside the campus irrespective of religion, and subsequent inter-religious marriages are nothing new, especially in Kerala, where there is more mingling between communities and less or no ghettoisation of particular religious groups. In most cases, there have been initial tensions in the families, obviously due to inability of the parents to cope with the fact, given the social and religious realities. Conversion is in fact a painful experience for the families involved.

However, there are thousands of mixed families in Kerala and elsewhere who have survived these initial obstacles and keep living, in some cases even in the same villages as of their families. Amazingly, there was no big hue and cry in Kerala when a Muslim girl, whose historic first rank in SSLC public exam was highly celebrated by each and every Muslim organization in the state, decided to live a marital life with her Christian boyfriend she met while studying MBBS. Generally, when such issues reach to police stations and courts, the will of the adult girl is asked and she is allowed to go accordingly.

However, in the controversial case involving two MBA students of Pathanamthitta Pokkanam St. Jones College, who fell in love with their Muslim boyfriends, they were compelled to go with their parents, without considering their repeated requests to go with their lovers. One of them had even called a press meet in Kottayam to clarify that she married her Muslim lover on her own will, and no one had converted her forcefully.

The reported change in the tones of the girls came only later, after the family got enough time to brainwash them. The picture and drama behind the ‘Love-Jihad’ episode becomes clearer when one knows that the Hindu girl belonged to the family of a top state BJP leader, while the Christian girl hails form the family of a high ranking police officer. More interestingly, Shahansha, the other boy involved, was the district president of MSF, the student wing of State Muslim League, which is well-known in the state for its strong stances and measures against all extremist forces among Muslims. The handsome boy was also a hero in the campus.

A state BJP leader traded blind allegations and distributed spicy stories of “love-jihad’ in a press conference. Suddenly everybody from the court and police to Christian leaders started speaking in the tongue of Sang Parivar. The Catholic Church in Kerala alerted parents and teachers about an ‘extremist Islamic strategy to convert young women through marriage’, adding that ‘movement is a network of organized young and handsome Muslim youths to lure girls, make them pregnant and dump them’. Shamelessly, it even announced a plan to organize defensive and corrective measures in co-operation with VHP against the actors in of this imagined tales.

Let’s look why anybody fail to believe these cooked stories. All from Sangh Parivar, the Catholic Bishops Council and the police now say that there are zonal offices under a chairman for the ‘Love-Jihad’ or ‘Romeo Jihad’ outfit in all the 14 districts of the state, and it has been working for long with the help of ‘terror funding’ by many international terrorist organizations. The outfit has already converted around 4,000 hindu and Christian girls. However, one wonders that then how come the entire security apparatus, which had extensively scrutinized each and every Muslim family in the state in the wake of recent controversy regarding ‘terror recruitment to Kashmir’, could not get any tip on the existence of this ‘highly active Love-jihad’ force before this incident.

There are many boys and girls who fall in love and marry non-Muslims, and it is well-known that generally these people happen to be less performing, willing to get out of the religious rituals and mores, interested in living a cool, happy and loose life. They usually get the wrath of religious authority for being ‘irreligious and lax’. It is the last thing to imagine about them that they are jihadis doing love to increase the number of Muslims. So far those practicing Muslims with caps and beards were the main terror suspects, now one of the immediate consequences of this propaganda will be targeting of these pleasure-loving, happy-going less or no religious Muslim youths, who generally happen to be the main link among communities.

Lastly and more importantly, the term love-jihad itself is self contradictory and abusive of its true religious meaning. ‘Jihad’ is striving hard in the struggle against one's own self, controlling of ill deeds, ill-words, and even ill thoughts and intentions. A true Muslim’s entire life should be an unending endevour to succeed in this ‘jihad’ so that he can be a shining light for all others.

Romantic Love in the eye of Islam is both prescriptive and proscriptive. Prescriptive and highly rewarded when it is intensely shared between the husband and wife. Proscriptive when is shared between two opposite sexes out of the marital bliss. The real relation between a male and his non-related girl should be that of mutual respect, and any kind of sexual overtones are discouraged in such a relation.

“Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that will make for greater purity for them” “And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty” (Quran: Nur: 30-31). ‘So a brazen stare by a man at women (or even at a man) is a breach of refined manners’. One has to strive hard to get this value, and Islam says it is the true jihad. How far and contradictory is this and using the same word to lure girls, abuse. Love does happen among Muslims also, but there is no way for any kind of religious interpretation to endorse it, let alone to use it as a weapon for conversion.