By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE – As part of an organized campaign, young Muslim men are deliberately luring women from different faiths into marriage so they will convert to Islam, say radical Indian Hindu and Christian groups in south India.
The alleged plot has been dubbed “love jihad”. It first surfaced in September, when two Muslim men from Pathanamthitta town in the southwestern state of Kerala reportedly enticed two women – a Hindu and a Christian – into marriage and forced them to convert to Islam.
The women first claimed to have became Muslims voluntarily, but after being allowed back to their parents’ houses said they had been abducted and coerced to convert. The men were reportedly members of Campus Front, a student wing of radical Muslim group the Popular Front of India (PFI).
The Pathanamthitta incident was followed by an avalanche of media reports on “love jihad”. Some described it as a movement, others claimed that forced conversions through marriage were actually being run by an organization called Love Jihad, or Romeo Jihad.
Hindu and Christian groups have weighed in with their own “facts” on the “love jihad”.
The Sri Ram Sene, a fundamentalist Hindu group, now claims thousands of girls were forcibly converted to Islam in the past few years after marrying Muslim men. It says that after conversion the women were “trained in anti-national activities”. India’s main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has said “love jihadis” have receiving foreign aid – from the Middle East – for the campaign.