Inter-faith couples as rebels

In the backdrop of rising Hindutva dominance, there are some who refuse to be intimidated into betraying their love—and religious identity. Illustration/Uday Mohite

Statistics rarely tell the complete story: In 2018-2019, roughly 260 enquiries were filed with Dhanak, an NGO that facilitates inter-faith couples to tie the knot under the Special Marriage Act (SMA), without one of them having to convert to the other's religion. Such inquiries will barely touch 80 in 2024-2025 by March-end. Dhanak's co-founder, Asif Iqbal, said militant Hindutva groups have combined with State functionaries to menace Hindu-Muslim couples, prompting them to part ways, or go to states where religious conversion for marriage is not proscribed.

Yet, in the backdrop of rising Hindutva dominance, there are some who refuse to be intimidated into betraying their love - and religious identity. They solemnise their union under the SMA or opt for a live-in relationship. I spoke to 10 such couples. All of them said their togetherness is an assertion against Hindutva; that their very "being and becoming" resist the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party from shaping India in their imagination.

They surprised me on two counts. One, all said the inter-faith relationship is infinitely more exciting than the same-faith one, for there is a new culture to discover, a syncretic way of life to evolve and live. Two, some scoffed the Hindutva brigade for not grasping human psychology - that what is prohibited acquires an irresistible allure.

They truly are rebels, although they didn't take to loving their partners, Hindu or Muslim, as a conscious act of defiance. They simply grew into love, and thereafter, in several instances, fought those who sought to separate them, and endured hardships and social ostracisation to be together.

A woman in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, said Hindutva groups visited her parents, offering to sabotage her marriage to a Muslim. They were shooed away. She and her partner threatened an official to either give in writing why he wouldn't register their marriage or face their sit-in. His dilatory tactics had turned them desperate as the December 2023 State Assembly elections approached, for they feared their chances of tying the knot would diminish in case the BJP were to displace the Congress in power.

Not so lucky was a woman in Jaipur, whose SMA application to marry, filed in June 2024, was leaked through WhatsApp, instigating myriad Hindutva groups to give a call to "save her from Love Jihad". They took her mother to a press conference where she wept, and toughies tried to bully her husband into forsaking her. "It only bolstered my resolve to marry him, even after my family broke ties with me," she said.

But the travails of the two Rajasthani women pale before those of their economically weaker counterpart in Bareilly. She married Alim Ahmed in a temple, but Hindutva groups compelled her to register a case against him for repeatedly raping her. She retracted her statement in the court. Yet district judge Ravi Kumar Diwakar sentenced Ahmed to life imprisonment, arguing that, though unemployed, she lived on her own and possessed an expensive Android phone, suggestive of Muslim groups engaged in Love Jihad financing her. She has appealed to the Allahabad High Court. Such are the wages of love!

Viewing his case through the prism of caste, a Dalit man said his marriage to a Muslim barely elicited opposition as his community is more accommodative of inter-faith relationships than, say, Brahmins. Yet the State, he said, would have been antagonised had he been Muslim and she Hindu.

A Delhi-based Hindu lawyer in a live-in relationship with a Muslim woman found his religious identity was no protection when they booked an accommodation in Lucknow through a hotel room aggregator. There were as many as 13 cancellations, goading him into calling up the 13th hotel. He was told their stay would earn the hotel an income, but its staff could tip off Hindutva groups, which might then ransack the hotel and harass them as well.

In Prime Minister Narendra Modi's India, innocence is lost early, as is true of a Gurgaon Muslim boy, whose mother lectured him on the perils of inter-faith relationships on learning he, in Std X then, was dating a Hindu. The bubble in which he had grown burst; his world was suddenly peopled with brawny men reared to hound Muslims who dare to love Hindu girls. Now in law college, he's yet again romancing a Hindu, who constantly frets over his safety. "I keep cracking jokes about conversion," he chuckled.

In an audacious experiment, a Muslim woman with a Hindu husband seeks to forge a new identity for their son. She has combined the letters in Ram and Ali, the two revered figures in Hinduism and Islam, to name the boy Malir, who doesn't have a surname either. A Std V student, the boy describes himself as atheist, and publicly objected to a classmate dubbing Muslims as filthy, in vindication of the Muslim part of his self.

Thus, the torch of love and rebellion is passed to another generation, to check India from becoming an imitation of Nazi Germany, which, in 1935, banned German ‘Aryans' from marrying Jews. India, in contrast, seeks to render the SMA infructuous through the troika of violent mobs, supine officials, and judges wedded to Hindutva.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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