Love jihad crusade strikes at India’s democracy

The Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance was passed into law in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in November, 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.

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

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

There’s probably no more than 75m Muslim men of marriageable 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 condemning Muslim 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 judges who 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. Those wicked Muslim boys go on marrying innocent Hindu girls. How long would it take for the ‘love jihad’ to create a Muslim-majority India?

I’m glad you asked. By my calculation, about 200,000 years, give or take a millennium 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 anti-Muslim 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 chief minister Yogi Adityanath, the parttime Hindu monk who passed the first of these laws, is not a religious extremist and a fanatical antiMuslim bigot. Of course he is. But there are more calculating people in the BJP who simply work out what will play best with Hindu voters.

Unemployment is high, the BJP’s initial response to the coronavirus was chaotic and the farmers are starting to revolt. And the government lost a mini-war with China in the Himalayas last June. It’s definitely time for a moraleboosting hate campaign and, unfortunately, a lot of people in northern India, especially highercaste BJP supporters, quite enjoy hating Muslims.

Of all the populist leaders who have come to power in democratic countries in the past few years, Modi is by far the most 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 world’s second-biggest country. Actually, Modi is more 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 of Modi. After 73 years of democracy in India, that would be a great pity.

‘‘Outstanding for people who live out that way and hopefully more residential properties to support them.’’ – tommy thomson151