Maggie Paul
What does the ‘love jihad’ narrative mean for the people who are often forgotten amid all the fearmongering–the lovers themselves? Maggie Paul draws on her life to reflect on the insidious logics behind the idea of ‘love jihad’ and how it has taken root in Kerala.
It was early 2020. My whole family had gathered for a cousin’s wedding in Kottayam. There was commotion, like in any wedding-bound house in the country. It was personally momentous to me for another reason. I was intending to announce my own long-nurtured relationship to my extended family. I met my (now) spouse—V—quite by accident while in university over a decade back. The story, when retold, has an enchanted aura around it. But the magic quickly disappears before the harsh reality of breaking the news to an Indian family. You see, my partner ‘made the mistake’ of being born into a Muslim family, and in contemporary India, that is unforgivable. I, meanwhile, was born into a Christian one.
Over chores and responsibilities, I kept rehearsing how I would break the news. Always looking for the ‘right’ moment. During this time, my extended family was also watching the first season of Family Man—a much-appreciated pan-Indian web series on Amazon Prime. It drew us all into the relatable work-life (im)balance of a diminutive undercover government agent, embedded in the thick of little worries that come along with middle-class family life in India. There was another reason my family was getting invested in the show: the mostly North Indian drama was interspersed with characters belting out dialogues in Malayalam. This made it more personal. And that was the trouble.
The series—shot from the vantage of multiple locations and perspectives—attempted some nuance in portraying the jigsaw of resentment that is present-day South Asia. It also had some ambitious dialogues that were impressive; à la ‘privacy is a myth, just like democracy’. But the larger driving tropes were overly familiar. Desh (nation) versus jihad. Multiple close-ups of an Islamic crescent-skull cap donned by a ‘lone wolf’ agent waging war against the Indian awaam (people). It had several innocuous-looking, supposedly smart young Muslim men—several from the state of Kashmir, like V is—who were undercover ‘jihadi’ mediators. And in the end, the sucker-punch to my plans of a grand announcement: The seemingly innocent, confounded and therefore endearing main Muslim character turns out to be an infidel-hating, murderous monster. He mercilessly kills the credulous god-fearing Malayali Christian girl, whom he first lures into a relationship and then uses for his escape. A perfect sinister plan using love as bait that hit a silent chord with all my family members.
I gulped down my ideas of a majestic revelation and opted for more opportune times, which ultimately never arrived.
***
‘Love jihad’ is a complex term, semantically. Love, meaning a universal emotion of soulful attachment that stirs passionate responses—from the simplest to the most intense. Jihad, in its Islamic rendition, meaning an extended effort, a spiritual struggle. Putting the two together, then, an extended struggle for love, could denote something profound, sublime. In its current political avatar, however, semantics do not matter.
In the boiling pot of Hindutva, seeking to establish a Hindu homeland in multi-religious India, this term has always been part of a ‘larger design’ by ‘sinister’ and ‘organised’ Muslim men to minoritise the majority, using ‘gullible’ and ‘helpless’ (Hindu) women as the stepping-stone. The idea is ensconced within a larger universe of global Islamophobia, borrowing motifs from anti-Muslim nationalisms worldwide (Frydenlund and Leidig 2022). Over the past decade, it has been baselessly explained and understood as a ‘hard fact’ of Muslim conspiracy against the purported Hindu nation in mainstream media. ‘Love jihad’ laws are already in place in several Indian states where Hindu nationalists are in power, although garbed in the language of anti-conversion and freedom of religion (Jamil 2021). Often, the appeal is that of ‘saving our daughters’ (Deccan Herald 2021) and stopping the ‘taking over of wombs meant for Hindu children’ (Gowen 2018); brutally infantilising and objectifying women—reducing them to bodies without will or voice—while also demonising Muslims, through a patriarchal-communal saviour complex. It has become a major electoral plank in several states (Outlook 2024a); impeding inter-faith marriages (Outlook 2024b), inviting unimaginable harassment of inter-religious couples (Neogi 2022), severe punishment (News18 2021) and even death (Ellis-Petersen and Khan 2022).
But it is not just the Hindutva brigade who are raving mad about it. When I first mumbled about the existence of V to my family in 2017—the year that the Hadiya case burst into news cycles in Kerala—years before we finally decided to get married, many of my well-meaning relatives broke down. They wept in biblical proportions. ‘Why a Muslim?’, they demanded, to my naïve incredulity. This response was partly because, unknown to many, Kerala is really where the origin story of the contemporary beast of ‘love jihad’ can, in fact, be traced back to (Strohl 2019). As early as 2009-10, it became a state where everyone, including journalists, courts, politicians and activists were ratcheting up moral panics over a Muslim plot to Islamise the state through love and marriage (Radhakrishnan 2012; Times of India 2010). Initiated by the efforts of right-wing Hindu groups, these widespread characterisations were both anti-Muslim and anti-women.
Groups within the ‘Syrian Christian’ religious umbrella (Kumar 2014) and, later, the all-powerful church, then jumped into the fray (Times of India 2021), allying with Hindutva groups and embedding fear in the psyches of devoted church-going Christians (Khan 2021). They repeatedly drummed up the ‘threat’ of ‘love jihad’ for Christian women in the state over the past decade, without any valid proof (Swamy 2020). In fact, in 2020—when I was still optimistically nurturing schemes to make my nuptial desires more palatable to my folks—the largest and immensely powerful Syro-Malabar Syrian Christian church (that my family is a part of) was claiming in circulars read out during Sunday mass that Christian women were under the threat of sinister agents, who were even recruiting them for the Islamic State (ISIS) (The News Minute 2020). I know, because I attended such a shameful mass with my family, feeling like I couldn’t breathe. Looking back, it is hard to miss similarities between these pastoral statements and the blatant 2023 propaganda movie called The Kerala Story, claiming to uncover the ‘hidden truth’ of mass-scale and orchestrated ISIS-linked inter-faith marriages in the state, using hugely exaggerated fraudulent data. 1
All this has further normalised Islamophobia and strengthened the capacity of right-wing civil society in Kerala—piggybacking on a historical alliance between upper-caste Hindu organisations and the Syrian Christian church (Devika 2009)—which the unsuccessful Hindutva forces in the state are now looking to profit from (James 2024). Even till last year, when I visited Kerala, the church continued to spread moral panics about ‘love jihad’ through local ‘prayer’ groups, all the while encouraging Syro-Malabar Catholic women to have more children to counter the ‘threat’ of their purported demographic decline. For me, it has meant that at least some from my extended family potentially imagine V as a suave, educated, ‘Romeo jihadi’ (Aga et al. 2021); a potential agent of the Islamic State trying to lure their intelligent yet gullible niece into the ‘evil’ Muslim fold.
***
I have often wondered about love. The ubiquitous emotion that seems to undergird ancient religious traditions as well as modern consumer culture. A feeling that simultaneously seems unadulterated—a collective trait that has helped us thrive as a species—as well as the most manipulable—marketed and sold by industries for profits and political actors for power. What is it about love that resonates and persists in all its hues?
In contemporary India, divided by innumerable political splinters, the idea of love is being washed and dried to be hung up, faded and dull, on the lines of nominal differences. It is being twisted and reinterpreted, gutted of its complexity and rendered skin-deep. This thinning out of love is the brainchild of unimaginative and violent anti-love institutions where inter-mixed unions are perceived as threats to make-believe ‘purity’ and supremacist hegemony. Historically, this has led to inconceivable horrors—such as the racist anti-miscegenation statutes in 19th– and 20th-century America that later inspired the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany. The mother of all anti-miscegenation lies closer home, however. In India, the ancient and ongoing disciplining of bodies to ensure so-called ‘caste purity’ through endogamy continues to brutally penalise inter-caste intimacies. The impulse of punishing inter-faith marriages and relationships is the same upper-caste-supremacist impulse that murders Dalits and inter-caste lovers for marrying, even loving, outside their caste.
In fact, as Sonja Thomas (2024) recently argued, the Syrian Christian clamour against ‘love jihad’ in Kerala emanates from fundamentally patriarchal and casteist positions. Syrian Christians who claim an upper-caste heritage and differentiate themselves from other Christian communities that converted from among those deemed lower-caste have always viewed endogamous (arranged) marriages as a means to maintain ‘purity’ (Dalit Camera 2013). This purity, in their view, can only be maintained by policing women’s sexual autonomy. Minorities, including Christians, are finding themselves in increasingly precarious positions within an ultranationalist far-right political culture in the country. At the same time, Syrian Christians harbour fears about the apparent demographic ‘decline’ within Kerala that are stoked by certain strands of political demography (The New Indian Express 2025). Given these existential threats, both real and imagined, Syrian Christian power structures have found it politically useful to be at the forefront of the nation-wide ‘love jihad’ contingent. They correlate their weakened political-economic clout within the state with a decline in population, which is the very base of maintaining the power of the church. This, in turn, fuels anxieties about ‘protecting their women’. Here, women are reduced to being reproductive vessels and the property of the community. Further, as prominent members of the global Malayali diaspora—outmigration being one of the reasons for their steep population decline in the state (The New Indian Express 2025)—Syrian Christians are also exposed to the Islamophobic population replacement conspiracies within far-right Christian nationalist circuits of the western world.
Apart from transnational Islamophobia, Thomas adds that the Syrian Christian crusade against ‘love jihad’ also needs to be understood as stemming from casteism. For instance, she observes that the pastoral diktats on ‘love jihad’ for over a decade have been ‘specifically against marriages between Syro-Malabar Catholic girls to (only) Bahujan Ezhuva [sic] Hindus and to (all) Muslims…[they do] not decry a match between a dominant caste Nair Hindu man and a Syro-Malabar Catholic woman because such a hypothetical interfaith marriage would be within the similar dominant caste’ (Thomas 2024: 517). Therefore, for the church, it’s only when ‘their’ women marry Bahujan or Muslim men that it becomes ‘love jihad’.
It goes without saying that in this marriage of convenience between the Syro-Malabar Church and the Hindutva ecosystem, the church is doing Hindutva’s work for it—breathing life into their make-believe narrative of Kerala as a ‘problem state,’ most luridly embodied by The Kerala Story film franchise. The troubling ironies of this alignment do not portend well for Kerala’s uniquely plural social fabric.
***
So, will love survive ‘love jihad’?
Even amid these crude population politics and their amplified discourses of hate, love—the kind that can pierce through flimsy layers of societal labels and connect to something deeper in another being—will endure. Because in the end, what makes love so tenacious and wondrous remains that it is unconditional. The juvenile portrayal of love by a fundamentalist troop in India is not everyone’s story 2. What I have learnt from my own journey so far is that there would be people, like both our immediate families, who will stand as bulwarks, in their own simple ways, against an onslaught of political and mental narrowness and violence; whose hearts will beat for connections that transcend ignorant stereotypes. People will always find a way for unqualified togetherness, and real love is ultimately democratic. It will always remain so.
And although it may not seem like it now, love will trump the paranoia around ‘love jihad’.
About the Author: Maggie Paul is a Lecturer of Political Economy and Global Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She studies the politics of migration and citizenship in South Asia, centreing histories of racial capitalism in the subcontinent. She is a lover of words, purrs, the awe-inducing pedagogical capabilities of plants and mangoes.
References
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