Love-jihad
The Hindu right’s conspiring Muslim men and innocent Hindu girls
Keywords:
Hindu right, Indian Muslims, love-jihad, political speech, propagandaAbstract
Love-jihad is a conspiracy theory created by the Hindu right in India, which claims that Muslim men lure Hindu girls with love, marry them and then force them to convert to Islam. Language is used in legal, procedural and media-mediated ways to frame Muslim men and Hindu women and construct the nation-state. Using work on language and propaganda, as well as critical postcolonial studies, as theoretical frameworks, this article argues that the Hindu right uses language as a weapon to cause harm to Hindu women and Muslim men, and to reinforce Hindu supremacy. A study of language used by political leaders about love-jihad offers a look at the collusion between different dimensions of discrimination. On the one hand, nationalist Hindus discriminate against Muslim men; on the other hand, the same Hindus are weakening Hindu women’s abilities to make decisions about their own lives. The article also shows that the seeds of harm that are sown with propagandist language result in the creation of anti-Muslim legislation, which also harms Hindu women.
References
AajTak (28 February 2021) Law against ‘love jihad’ for all, not just Muslims: UP CM Yogi Adityanath. Prabhu Chawla interview with Yogi Adityanath. India Today. Retrieved 15 March 2021 from https://www.indiatoday.in/india/video/law-love-jihad-muslims-yogi-adityanath-1773839-2021-02-27
Ahearn, Laura (2001) Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 109–137. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.109
ANI (25 November 2020) Smriti Irani backs states’ decision to bring law on ‘Love Jihad’. The Economic Times. Retrieved 6 April 2021 from https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/smriti-irani-backs-statesdecision-to-bring-law-on-love-jihad/videoshow/79410170.cms
Banerjee, Sikata (2020) Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Bharatiya Janata Party (2021) Shri Amit Shah addresses public meeting in Kamrup, Assam. YouTube. Retrieved 6 April 2021 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfKWgWWBahQ
Bose, Sugata and Jalal, Ayesha (1998) Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. London: Routledge.
Bucholtz, Mary and Hall, Kira (2004) Language and identity. In Alessandro Duranti (ed) A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology 369–394. London: Blackwell.
Butler, Judith (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.
Chakravartty, Paula and Roy, Srirupa (2014) Mr. Modi goes to Delhi: mediated populism and the 2014 Indian elections. Television & New Media 16(4): 311–322. .https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476415573957
Chatterjee, Indrani (2013) Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Glick, Peter and Fiske, Susan T. (2001) An ambivalent alliance: hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications for gender inequality. American Psychologist 56(2): 109–118. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.2.109
Gupta, Charu (2009) Hindu women, Muslim men: love-jihad and conversions. Economic and Political Weekly 44(51): 13–15.
India Population Census (2011) India religion population data. Retrieved 18 March 2021 from https://www.census2011.co.in/religion.php
Jaffrelot, Christophe (2015) The Modi-centric BJP 2014 election campaign: new techniques and old tactics. Contemporary South Asia 23(2): 151–166. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2015.1027662
Jaffrelot, Christophe (2016) Narendra Modi between Hindutva and subnationalism: the Gujarati asmita of a Hindu Hriday Samrat. India Review 15(2): 196–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2016.1165557
Joy, Shemin and Poovaiah, Dhanyata M. (29 November 2020) Abuse persists as new forms of dowry crop up. Deccan Herald. Retrieved 28 March 2021 from https://www.deccanherald.com/specials/insight/abuse-persists-as-new-forms-of-dowry-crop-up-921177.html
Kapur, Ratna (2020) Gender and the ‘faith’ in law: equality, secularism, and the rise of the Hindu Nation. Journal of Law and Religion 35(3): 407–431. https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2020.42
Langton, Rae and West, Caroline (1999) Scorekeeping in a pornographic language game. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77(3): 303–319. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048409912349061
Levon, Erez (2010) Language and the Politics of Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays in Israel. London: Routledge.
Lewis, David (1979) Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic 8: 339–359. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-67458-7_12
Mallampalli, Chandra (2010) Escaping the grip of personal law in colonial India: proving custom, negotiating Hindu-ness. Law and History Review 28(4): 1043–1065. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248010000763
McConnell-Ginet, Sally (2020) Words Matter: Meaning and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Milani, Tommaso M., Levon, Erez, Glocer, Ruth (2019) Crossing boundaries: visceral landscapes of Israeli nationalism. Sociolinguistic Studies 13(1): 37–56. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.36209
Nagar, Ila. (2021) The Language of Suppression: Muslims, Migrant Workers, and India’s Response to COVID-19. Language in Society 52(2): 321–344. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404521000816
Ramani, Srinivasan (23 May 2019) Analysis: highest ever national vote share for the BJP. The Hindu. Retrieved 8 April 2021 from https://www.thehindu.com/elections/lok-sabha-2019/analysis-highest-ever-national-vote-share-for-the-bjp/article27218550.ece
Rao, Mohan (2011) Love jihad and demographic fear. Indian Journal of Gender Studies 18(3): 425–430. https://doi.org/10.1177/097152151101800307
Santa Ana, Otto, Juárez, Marco Antonio, Reséndez, Magaly, Hernández, John, Gaytán, Oscar, Cerón, Kimberly, Gómez, Celeste and Solís, Roberto (2020) Making our nation fear the powerless. In Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton (eds) Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies 237–250. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) Can the subaltern speak? Die Philosophin 14(27): 42–58. https://doi.org/10.5840/philosophin200314275
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty and Butler, Judith (2007) Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging. London: Seagull Books.
Stanley, Jason (2015) How Propaganda Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stanley, Jason (2018) How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House.
Strohl, David James (2019) Love jihad in India’s moral imaginaries: religion, kinship, and citizenship in late liberalism. Contemporary South Asia 27(1): 27–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2018.1528209
Times of India (22 September 2018) Honour killings: more than 300 cases in last three years. The Times of India. Retrieved 28 March 2021 from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/honour-killings-more-than-300-cases-in-last-three-years/articleshow/65908947.cms
Tirrell, Lynne (2012) Genocidal language games. In Ishani Maitra and Mary Kate McGowan (eds) Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech 174–221. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tyagi, Aastha and Sen, Atreyee (2020) Love-jihad (Muslim sexual seduction) and ched-chad (sexual harassment): Hindu nationalist discourses and the ideal/deviant urban citizen in India. Gender, Place & Culture 27(1): 104–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1557602
U.P. Ordinance Number 21 (2020) The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance. Promulgated by the Governor of Uttar Pradesh.
Wmmatrimonial (12 December 2016) Current trends arranged marriages in India. Medium. Retrieved 17 March 2021 from https://medium.com/@solutionswebomania/current-trends-arranged-marriages-in-india-e0435d455e8e
