THE Hindu Right seems to have found a new agenda to arouse passions through the alleged ‘love jihad’ movement, supposed to have been launched by Muslim fundamentalists, to convert Hindu and Christian women through trickery. It is ironical that there is an uncanny resemblance of the issue and its language with similar ‘abduction’ and conversion campaigns launched by Arya Samaj and other Hindu revivalist bodies in the 1920s in north India, to draw sharper lines between Hindus and Muslims. Seen through the prism of a historical perspective, the dichotomy and falseness of the allegations of the Hindu Right appear more starkly.
In the 1920s, militant Hindu assertion reached new heights. There were unprecedented communal clashes in UP. What is significant in the present context is that in this period the Hindu woman’s body became a marker to sharpen communal boundaries in ways more aggressive than before. The period witnessed a flurry of orchestrated propaganda campaigns and popular inflammatory and demagogic appeals by a section of Hindu publicists and Arya Samaj against ‘ abductions’ and conversions of Hindu women by Muslim goondas, ranging from allegations of rape, abduction and elopement, to luring, conversion, love, and forced marriages.
Drawing on diverse sources like newspapers, pamphlets, meetings, handbills, posters, novels, myths, rumours and gossip, the campaign was able to operate in a public domain, and to monopolise the field of everyday representation. Tracts with provocative titles appeared. One was called Hindu Auraton ki Loot , which denounced Muslim propaganda for proselytising female preys.
http://newageislam.com/-love-jihad---politics-of-cultural-virginity/islam-and-politics/d/2030
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3:35 AM
Moderate Islamist here
