Purola Love Jihad, ‘moderates’, Islamists: Victims into aggressors

Hindu women have long been the vessel, exploited and subjugated in the cultural and religious wars that Hindus have defended themselves against over thousands of years. From the age of the Mughal tyrants who filled their harems with Hindu women to be used and abused, to Hindu women of defeated Kings being taken as sex slaves, with even their dead bodies being raped. The saga of Hindu women being subjugated in religious wars by the Islamists has continued over the ages, only, the undisguised contempt has found many PR agents who attempt to package the bigotry with sophistry.

In Purola, Uttarakhand, Hindus decided that they would not stand by idly while Hindu girls were being brutalised. After a minor was abducted by a Muslim man, Hindus took to the streets to protest and ensure that Islamists in the area heard them loud and clear – We will not accept the subjugation of our daughters anymore. That Hindus dared to resist Islamist aggression triggered a barrage of reports by the media, tweets by Liberals and Islamists and outrage galore about Muslims being in grave danger of aggression from the Hindu community.

The Chief of Jamiat-Ulama-i-Hindu, Maulana Madani, wrote to Home Minister Amit Shah playing the victim and crying copious amounts of tears about Muslims being in danger. In his letter to Amit Shah, he furthered to usual tropes about how the gulf between Hindus and Muslims would only increase if the Mahapanchayat was held in Purola by Hindus. He cried hoarse about Muslims being in danger, about hate speech, how Muslims are being expelled (turned out to be untrue) and how Hindus of the area and creating a communal divide.

Of course, what Madani’s letter essentially indicates is that the abduction of a minor Hindu girl does nothing to divide the two communities, what truly divides the two communities is when Hindus decide to protest against Islamist aggression.

As has been our History, Muslim aggression is often whitewashed while condemning Hindu self-defence. During the Direct Action Day, on the 17th of August after 2 days of Hindus being massacred, Gopal Chandra Mukhopadhyay rose like a phoenix. Gopal Patha (Patha means ‘lamb’. He was called so because he ran a mutton shop) had already founded the Bharat Jatiya Bahini, an organisation of young men to help fellow citizens during a natural calamity. On the 17th, Gopal Patha turned from a philanthropist to a warrior, ready to defend his people. Throughout the night, Gopal Patha, along with his young men from the Bharat Jayati Bahini worked on a plan on how they could defend Hindus from the Muslim barbarians. The Marwaris offered finances, others spent the night making weapons for them. 

Muslim League chief minister of Bengal, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and the Muslim League goons had decided on the 17th that they were going to take two more days to complete the annihilation of Hindus. But they had not taken into consideration their greatest roadblock. Gopal Patha. 

From the 18th to 20th, Gopal Patha and his men put up a brave fight, paying the Muslim League goons back in equal measure, if not more. Historian Sandip Bandopadhyay wrote, “They faced resistance everywhere. Hindu youths counter-attacked with such ferocity that the Muslim League men had to flee. Many were killed. Emboldened by their success in taking on and defeating their Islamist attackers, Hindu youths took the fight to Muslim-majority areas and started killing Islamist men. They did not, however, touch Muslim women and children or the aged and the infirm”. 

By the 19th of August, suddenly, the Muslims started feeling unsafe. Only two days of retribution, of self-defence, and the Muslim League started running with their tail between their legs. It was only on the 21st of August when the Muslims had started feeling unsafe because the Hindus dared to defend themselves, did Viceroy’s rule come into action in Bengal.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi at the time had asked Gopal Patha to lay down his weapons and not defend the Hindus. During the Noakhali riots, countless Hindus were raped and murdered. The converted Hindus were made to write declarations that they had accepted Islam out of their free will and Hindus in the 2000 square mile area were made to pay the Jaziya. When MK Gandhi had visited Naokhali, he was rebuked by the Muslim League and after that, he had travelled to Bihar to stop the retaliatory violence by the Hindus. There, he is famed to have said that Hindus must leave Noakhali or die – this, because the Muslim League had asked him to quell the violence, the same Muslim League that was raping Hindu women, beheading Hindu women and waging a war against Kaffirs. 

As was then, it is now. Every time there is unprovoked religious aggression against Hindus, it either falls on the shoulders of Hindus to assuage the tension caused by the said aggression, or, the cabal finds a way to not only blame Hindus for their own victimisation but also accuse them of ‘creating tension’.

Love Jihad – an unprecedented onslaught against Hindus girls, whitewashed, justified and blamed on the victims

Islamist violence against Hindus, while aiming to subjugate Kafirs universally, comes in different clusters. There is one cluster of crimes that is characterised by an onslaught against Temples and Murthis, another, for example, manifests itself through coordinated riots, blasphemy riots and murders, low-level violence against individuals belonging to the Hindu faith etc. One specific and targeted cluster of Islamist crimes against Hindus is popularly known as Love Jihad.

Love Jihad is essentially religiously motivated crimes by Islamists where they trap Hindu women, either by misrepresenting their faith or otherwise, and later, force them to convert to Islam, murder them if they don’t comply, perpetuate violence against them etc. There are many contours of Love Jihad crimes. For example, there are cases where Islamists have brainwashed minor Hindu women also to convert their religion to Islam in the name of “love”. These crimes against minors are often characterised as consensual by the Left, however, religious brainwashing leading to a change of faith and in many cases, elopement, can hardly be called consensual when it affects girls who are young and hardly have the maturity to understand and resist religious manipulation.

In this article, we won’t necessarily go into defining Love Jihad and all of its threads, however, the basic premise is evident and common – Muslim men often manipulate, brainwash or lie to trap Hindu women. There is an element of religious conversion or hate against the Hindu women/girls specifically because they are non-Muslim and eventually, that hate either leads to ensuring that the woman converts to Islam, failing which, the girl is tortured, murdered or raped. It is also true in several cases that the relationship is consensual, with the Hindu woman fully aware of the Muslim man’s religious identity, however, as the relationship progresses, the woman is either a recipient of torture and hate because of her religious identity, and attempt to convert or worse, murdered.

Such hate crimes are rampant with several cases being documented on a regular basis. Islamists and the Left which acts as the ideological backbone of the Islamists have been whitewashing these crimes, shamelessly and with impunity. They first claimed that all inter-faith relationships are being branded Love Jihad because of the Hindus’ hate for Muslims and when that trope fell flat, they proceeded to paint the Muslims as the victims of ‘Love Jihad’ and the rampant religious crimes against Hindu women and girls.

How Left media lets Islamists turn the victims into aggressors

After the Purola case, for example, where the local Hindus decided to protest against the Islamist aggression, The Wire and its resident Islamist Arfa Khanum Sherwani spoke to the Jamiat-Ulama-i-Hind chief in a mutually beneficial interview where they both gave each other tools to whitewash crimes against Hindus.

लव-जिहाद के झूठ को किस तरह भारत में मुसलमानों को बदनाम करने के लिये इस्तेमाल किया जा रहा है। राजनीति से लेकर, नौकरशाही और ज्यूडीशरी तक इस शब्द का प्रसार कर नफ़रत फैलाने की कोशिश हो रही है।
जमियत-उल-उलेमा-हिंद के अध्यक्ष महमूद मदनी ये ⁦@thewire_in⁩ पर मेरी बातचीत pic.twitter.com/H84yn0PEe4

— Arfa Khanum Sherwani (@khanumarfa) June 18, 2023

In the video, continuing the process of playing victim, Maulana Mahmood Asa’d Madani says that the word “Jihad” itself is being used by Hindus to create hate against Muslims and humiliate them. He says further that the word Jihad is meant to be used with very specific connotations for very specific people. Interestingly, he does not go on to define what Jihad is per se. He merely says that it is a trope used to humiliate Muslims by not just Hindu organisations but also by the government, the judiciary, the people, the police so on and so forth.

What is evident right off the bat is that Maulana Mahmood Asa’d Madani truly believes, or at least wants the world to believe, that Muslims have the proprietary right to be called the victims. No matter what, they are always the victims, and must be categorised as such and those who don’t buy into the charade are the ones spreading ‘hate’. Further, he also believes that every institution in the nation which does not conform to his lies, propaganda and religiously bigotry is someone who is explicitly against Muslims.

The Left and Islamists like Maulana Mahmood Asa’d Madani seem to be exactly on the same page here. Despite the Islamist aggression, it is the Muslims who are to branded as victims in perpetuity. The Communal Violence Bill aimed to do just that. In the Purola case too, for example, it is a Muslim man who abducted a minor Hindu girl but the narrative is spun as such that the Muslims of the area are the REAL victims simply because the Hindus decided to protest against these religiously motivated crimes. Delhi Riots was another such example. While people from both communities died in the riots, it is pertinent to note that the Delhi anti-Hindu riots were planned for 3 months before the low-level everyday violence and hate speech culminated in the anti-Hindu riots. Several Islamists and Leftists had meticulously planned the riots to “teach Kafirs a lesson”, in the words of Tahir Hussain. The violence in February 2020 started with an onslaught against Hindus as well. The first to lose his life in the riots was countable Ratan Lal who was lynched to death by a Muslim mob. Thereafter, others like Ankit Sharma, Dilbar Negi and several others were brutally murdered. Disregarding the conspiracy, the plan hatched, the meticulous planning of the violence, the hateful slogans and so much more, the global media run by the Left and the Islamists cries hoarse turning it into an anti-Muslim pogrom. The propaganda was such that NDTV deliberately cropped live footage of a mosque to ensure that bricks on the terrace were not visible to people.

In the Love Jihad saga as well, Maulana Mahmood Asa’d Madani tried exactly the same. Platformed by The Wire, which had also participated in painting the Muslim community as the victim community of the Delhi anti-Hindu riots, and Arfa Khanum Sherwani, who had given an infamous speech telling Muslims to pretend to be secular during the anti-CAA violence leading to the Delhi Riots, the narrative by the Maulana was rather simple – Love Jihad as a cluster of crimes is being used to malign Muslims, target them, even though it was Muslim men who were actually targeting Hindu girls and women.

Maulana Madni also insisted that Jihad is not what it’s understood to mean and therefore, its use to define criminal conduct on the part of religious zealots is a ploy to target the Muslim community. Jihad, in essence, is the duty of every Muslim. It is defined as the fight against the ‘enemies of Islam’. It is common knowledge that anyone who does not subscribe to Islamic beliefs and believes in the supremacy of Allah is categorised as the ‘enemy of Islam’.

According to New Age Islam, an Islamic reformist organization, “The word Kufr means to reject faith in God, God’s signs, the prophets, the Holy Scriptures and the Day of Judgment. One who does not have faith in the unity of God and does not have faith also in other sacred signs of God is a Kafir, according to the Quran. One who rejects faith in God or does not have faith in God is called a Kafir. A Kafir may also be an idolater who worships gods and goddesses. According to the Quran, they are those who have gone astray. There are about 350 verses about Kufr and Kafir. In the majority of the verses, Kufr is non-belief in one God and prophets of God and in Holy Scriptures. Kufr is also the worship of idols and gods and goddesses other than God. In some of the verses, the word Kufr and its variations are used to mean ingratitude for the favours of God. It is natural that if someone does not recognize God or does not have faith in God, he will also not acknowledge God’s favours but will attribute the favours to his gods and goddesses.”

The words Kufr and Kafirun and Kafirin and their other variations are used for non-belief in Allah, the Holy Scriptures of Islam, its messengers and the Day of Judgment. These are variations of the word Kafir. New Age Islam also lists numerous quotes from the Quran so that readers can understand what the word Kafir and its variations mean. Here is a list of verses cited by the website. That list can be read here.

Now, if Kafirs are enemies of Islam and a right must be waged against them (Jihad) then one has to wonder how the Maulana and what basis he wishes for people to believe that Jihad in itself does not include a fight against Hindus and ‘idolators’. And if that is true, one then has to believe that the hundreds of cases that are documented on a regular basis are quintessential ‘Love Jihad’ and there is no grand conspiracy to humiliate Muslims, but only to talk about the conduct of religious zealots who think it is their duty to subjugate Hindus.

The Hindu community is more than willing to concede that these cases of Love Jihad are not religiously sanctioned but are only the zealotry of a few religious fanatics, however, I would daresay that it is the conduct of the so-called moderate Muslims that is painting the entire Muslim community as the aggressor. It is the so-called moderate Muslim like Arfa Khanum Sherwani who ensures that the victimisation of Hindu women at the hands of religious zealots, and Islamists, is whitewashed and it is because of people like her that one is forced to consider if the entire Muslim community condones such actions. Hindus are merely trying to talk about their victimisation and say, ‘thus far and no further’. If that conversation and protest against their own victimisation is also a cause for the reverse victimisation of the aggressors, a theory peddled by those who wish to call themselves ‘moderate’, then one would only be forced to wonder if indeed a large chunk of the community has normalised the religious persecution of Hindu girls – and that eventual chasm is going to be the responsibility of ‘moderates’ like Arfa, not the Hindus.