LOVE & HATE
A new law in UP is being seen as a threat to basic constitutional rights
The Uttar Pradesh police, on December 2, stopped a wedding between a 24-year-old Muslim man and a 22-year-old Hindu woman in Lucknow’s Duda Colony. The ceremony was to be solemnised as per Hindu rituals and had the consent of both families. The police, who were acting on a complaint by a vigilante group, asked the couple to seek the district magistrate’s nod for their marriage. Official permission for interfaith marriages is mandatory under the new Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance 2020, promulgated on November 28 by the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in the state.
While the couple in Lucknow was relieved to escape punitive action, others in UP have not been as lucky. Since the ordinance came into effect, police have registered five cases relating to interfaith marriages and arrested seven people. On December 6, members of the Sangh Parivar-affiliated Bajrang Dal reached the marriage registration office in Moradabad and took a Muslim man and a Hindu woman, who had come to register their marriage solemnised in July, to the police. The man and his brother were arrested on the basis of a complaint filed by the woman’s mother that her daughter had been lured into the marriage and converted. This was despite the woman asserting that her relationship was consensual. Two days later, on receiving a phone call that a Muslim man was marrying a Hindu woman after converting her, police stopped a marriage in Kushinagar and questioned the groom and the bride—both Muslims. The allegation turned out to be false and the couple got married the next day.
Instances of such vigilantism and police overzealousness are increasingly being reported since the promulgation of the contentious ordinance premised on ‘love jihad’—a conspiracy theory, peddled by radical Hindu fringe groups, about Muslim men luring Hindu women into marriage and converting them by guile or force. As
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath thundered at a rally in Jaunpur on October 31: “I warn those who conceal identity and play with our sisters’ respect. If you don’t mend your ways, your ‘Ram naam satya (chant associated with Hindu funerals)’ journey will begin.”
Justifying the ordinance, UP cabinet minister and spokesperson Sidharth Nath Singh said: “Over a hundred incidents of forceful religious conversions had been reported. There were also reports of religious conversions in the state using deceitful means. So, to make a law on this becomes an important policy matter now.” The ordinance came just two days after the Kanpur police had filed a report on an investigation into 14 cases of inter-religious relationships, which asserted that 11 of these cases were indeed instances of marriages involving deception over one partner’s religion.
Critics argue that by promulgating the ordinance, the UP government may be seen as having practically