Love jihad crusade strikes at heart of India’s democracy

The Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinancewas passed into law in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh last month, providing jail sentences of up to 10 years for Muslim men who marry Hindu women with the intention of converting them.

‘‘Love jihad’’ must be stopped at all costs, to preserve the Hindu majority in India.

Primeminister Narendra Modi, occasionally known in the White House as ‘‘India Trump’’, depends almost exclusively on Hindu votes to win elections, so anything that threatens to reduce the number of Hindu voters is obviously a problem for him.

People withmathematical skills, however, may calculate the threat isn’t big.

India’s population is one-anda-third billion people and there are only 195 million Muslim Indians – 14 per cent of the whole. For Muslims to become the majority by love jihad will requiremuslim men to marry at least 481m Hindu girls.

There’s probably no more than 75m Muslim men ofmarriageable age in India and most of them are already married. According to Islam, and to Indian law, Muslim men can have up to four wives, but there’s still not enough Muslim men to marry all those Hindu women without exceeding four wives each.

Moreover, the conspirators behind the love jihad are condemningmuslim women in India to crowded marriages, or alternatively no marriage at all.

They clearly haven’t thought this through properly.

In the weeks since the ordinance was passed in Uttar Pradesh, no more than one mixed-religion couple a day has been arrested in the state.

And about half the couples arrested have already been released by the courts after the female (Hindu) partner said there had been no compulsion. Hindu men married to Muslim women, of course, are exempt from the law.

If the government can’t stop the ‘‘leakage’’ caused by judgeswho fail to get into the spirit of the thing, it’s definitely going to be slow.

At that rate, it will take quite a while to create a Muslim majority in Uttar Pradesh, population 235m. It will be a bit faster if Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) can bring the judges to heel, but still.

Four more Bjp-ruled states are already planning to pass identical laws against love jihad, but for the sake of argument let’s assume for a moment that they don’t work.

Thosewicked Muslim boys go on marrying innocent Hindu girls.

How long would it take for the love jihad to create amuslim-majority India?

I’m glad you asked. By my calculation, about 200,000 years, give or take amillennium or two. So the disloyal thought occurs that maybe the BJP’S goal in passing laws against an alleged Muslim love jihad isn’t really to defend the majority status of the Hindu population and its own voting base.

Maybe it’s to stir up antiMuslim hatred and paranoia and energise Hindu voters who are getting a bit disillusioned with the BJP.

That’s not to say that Uttar Pradesh’s chiefminister Yogi Adityanath, the part-time Hindu monkwho passed the first of these laws, is not a religious extremist and a fanatical anti-muslim bigot. Of course he is. But there are more calculating people in the BJP who simply work out whatwill play best with Hindu voters.

The BJP won a landslide victory in last year’s national election thanks in large part to a fortuitous military confrontation with Pakistan at just the right time, but its economic performance has been poor and it has been losing state elections even in its traditional strongholds.

Unemployment is high, the BJP’S initial response to the coronavirus was chaotic and the farmers are starting to revolt.

And, of course, the government lost amini-war with China in the

Himalayas last June.

It’s definitely time for amoraleboosting hate campaign and, unfortunately, a lot of people in northern India, especially highercaste BJP supporters, quite enjoy hatingmuslims.

Of all the populist leaders who have come to power in democratic countries in the past few years, Modi is by far themost dangerous – partly because he is more clever and more disciplined than people such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Rodrigo Duterte, and partly because India is the secondbiggest country in the world.

Actually, Modi ismore like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan – also clever, also cynically manipulating religion even though he is genuinely a believer – and 17 years in power.

Indian democracy has quite deep roots, but it probably wouldn’t survive 17 years ofmodi. Indian journalist Tavleen Singh wrote recently in the Indian Express: ‘‘We seem in India to be regressing into a Hindu version of Pakistan.’’

After 73 years of democracy in India, that would be a great pity.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi depends almost exclusively on Hindu votes to win elections, so anything that threatens to reduce the number of Hindu voters is obviously a problem for him.