After trying in vain to stall the release of The Kerala Story, a heart-wrenching story of unsuspecting non-Muslim girls in Kerala lured into a love jihad trap and taken to ISIS-controlled territories as sex slaves or mercenaries, the Islamists masquerading as ‘journalists’ and ‘intellectuals’ are now dismissing the occurrence of ‘love jihad’ altogether, in a bid to discredit the harsh reality the movie depicts.
One such masquerader is Arfa Khanum Sherwani, a ‘journalist’ with the leftist propaganda portal ‘The Wire’, which has been at the forefront of prejudicial media outlets leading a crusade to reject love jihad cases and paint them as Islamophobic schemes.
Recently, Sherwani took to Twitter to attack The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story, claiming that they were state-sponsored propaganda. For Ms Sherwani, the movie that chronicled the exodus of lakhs of Kashmiri Pandits and brought to light the religion-based atrocities hitherto swept under the rug lest it would affect the ‘secular fabric’ of the country, became state-sponsored propaganda because what it portrayed did not jibe with the narrative that Sherwani and her likes have been peddling for years now.
Similarly, Ms Sherwani also attacked another pathbreaking movie, The Kerala Story, which for the first time, brought on the silver screen the menace of religious indoctrination faced by impressionable women in Kerala. Since the premise of the movie is based on ‘love jihad’, where a Muslim man uses deceit to lure a non-Muslim into a romantic relationship and later pressurises her into embracing Islam, Ms Sherwani attacked the notion of ‘love jihad’ itself, calling it propaganda and a lie.
“Love-Jihad is nothing but an Islamophobic conspiracy theory,” Ms Sherwani posted in her Twitter rant against The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story.
While Ms Sherwani wants her followers to believe that Love Jihad is a myth and an imaginary construct aimed at whipping up Islamophobia, the trials and tribulations of the victims of the social menace reveal the uncomfortable reality that she and others like her want to obscure. The countless testimonies of the victims speak volumes of the existence and the pervasiveness of the scourge bedevilling many Hindu women, leaving them with permanent scars and trauma for the rest of their lives if their tormentors had left them alive.
Even as Arfa Sherwani dismisses love jihad as propaganda, the cries of victims reveal the seriousness of the menace
A recent case from Uttar Pradesh stands testament to the reality of love jihad. A Muslim man, Jamal Khan, lured a Hindu woman in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, by concealing his identity and introducing himself as Sonu. He later converted her to Islam and married her. A few days later, he invoked the outlawed triple talaq, forcing her to leave the home.
The tragedy did not stop just there. The victim further informed that the perpetrator started physically assaulting her after their marriage when she found out that he was already married to someone else. In response to her complaint, the Majhola police filed an FIR and initiated an inquiry into the matter.
Just days before, another incident of love jihad was reported from the Khudel region of Indore, Madhya Pradesh, after the state police arrested a person named Asmat Patel, his father Shabbir Ali and his brother Haider Ali for forcing a Hindu girl to commit suicide.
According to the police complaint, Asmat met an 18-year-old Hindu girl in his college and later developed a friendship with her. He then forced her to get married to him and accept Islam and also threatened that he would abduct her if she doesn’t agree. The girl informed about Asmat to his father who warned him and his family members, Haider, Shabbir and Shahjahan to stay away from the girl.
However, Asmat issued threats to the father of the girl and said that he wanted to marry her and would abduct her if she doesn’t agree. He also pressured her and sent derogatory messages on her phone. The father then took possession of the phone and deleted the messages. Asmat, after knowing this, started sending derogatory messages to the girl’s uncle. The girl felt pressured by the continuous terrorization and decided to end her life to end the saga. She consumed poison and was declared dead after she was immediately taken to the hospital by her family members.
Similarly, in early April, another incident of love jihad was reported from the Gwalior district of Madhya Pradesh. A gym trainer was booked for allegedly raping a woman by keeping her son at knifepoint. He had introduced himself as a Hindu to cultivate a friendship with a Hindu woman, but after she learnt that he had lied to her about his religious identity, she severed her ties with him. As revenge, he came to her house and raped her.
In March 2023, yet another case of love jihad came to the fore as a man named Shadab entrapped a girl into a love affair while pretending to be a Hindu boy. He then allegedly took her to a hotel on the pretext of celebrating her birthday, where he spiked her drink. Thereafter, he raped her and took compromising photographs with her which he used to blackmail her to the tune of Rs 55 lakhs.
A month before that, in February 2023, a love jihad case was reported from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, after a 14-year-old Hindu girl lodged a complaint accusing a Muslim youth of threatening and blackmailing her for refusing to convert to Islam and marry him.
In her complaint, the minor alleged that the 20-year-old accused identified as Shabbir Khan posed as a Hindu named Sameer Kumar and befriended her near her school about a month ago. The two soon grew close and entered into a relationship, following this, Shabbir clicked several obscene pictures of the victim.
However, after a month the minor girl found out that Sameer was actually Shabbir Khan, and he had changed his identity to start the relationship with her. When she learned about the real identity of the accused, she broke up with him and tried to distance herself from him. However, the accused Shabbir started blackmailing the victim to convert to Islam and perform a Nikah with him. On refusing, the accused threatened to circulate her private pictures on social media.
In the same month, another case of love jihad was reported from Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh. A Dalit woman, living in a village in the Jarcha Kotwali area in Greater Noida, was raped by her boyfriend Babbar Ali on the pretext of marrying her. The woman was then gang-raped by Babbar Ali and his friend. When the victim asked Babbar Ali to marry her, he started forcing her to convert to Islam.
According to reports, the Dalit woman was trapped in love by a goon Babbar Ali in the village. On the pretext of marriage, he first had physical relations with the victim and then gang-raped her with his friend. It is alleged that when the victim insisted they get married, the accused said she must first convert to Islam to tie the knot.
The aforementioned cases are the number of love jihad incidents catalogued by OpIndia in the last 2-3 months. They do not, in any way, represent an exhaustive list of love jihad incidents across the country in the past few months. It is likely that more cases of love jihad were reported from various parts of the country but failed in capturing the national imagination, owing to several reasons, including lack of coverage by mainstream media organisations. Therefore, it must be borne in mind that these are not the actual number of love jihad cases throughout the nation in the last 2-3 months. This is a compilation of the cases that OpIndia covered. There are several cases that we may have missed and hundreds that never got reported by the media.
In fact, OpIndia has consistently been at the forefront of reporting incidents in which vulnerable Hindu women are groomed to accept their own subjugation at the hands of Muslim men. Year after year, we have documented numerous such occurrences. In 2022 alone, OpIndia reported more than 150 cases of love jihad that took place in various parts of the country.
There is also another element of stigma and fear of retribution attached to love jihad cases, which might compel victims to not report them at all. There could be numerous such occurrences where the victims’ families do not report it due to fear of retaliation because the perpetrators might be coming from financially stronger and influential families or have strong political connections or the belief that it would bring disrepute to the family. Another key reason why many similar incidences do not reach the public eye is that, due to its obvious bias toward the minority community, the leftist mainstream media usually fails to consider such situations severe enough to cover.
While the Left and the so-called liberals have always dismissed these occurrences as a figment of the ‘right-wing imagination’, the cases are real. The dead bodies are also real and the threat is imminent.Yet, the likes of Arfa Khanum Sherwani describe the reality of love jihad as propaganda, which not only dishonours the sufferings of hundreds and thousands of victims and dehumanises them but it also provides cover fire to Islamists, who carry on with their nefarious designs, luring unsuspecting and unwitting non-Muslims into a love relationship, only to have them converted into the Islamic fold.
The whitewashing of such grave crimes only emboldens Islamists, who continue to bank on their intellectual brethren to project ‘love jihad’ as a fantasy as they sneak around searching for another potential victim to be exploited and abused.
