Kamala Harris and India’s laws against “love jihad”

by RAJMOHAN GANDHI

A civil right activist holds placards during a demonstration condemning the passing of laws against ‘Love Jihad’ by various state governments, Bangalore, India, December 1, 2020. PHOTO/Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Al Jazeera

The unpredictable impact of Trump’s post-defeat temper on Georgia’s January 6 Senate runoffs intrigues me as I wait and watch in Illinois. Also fascinating, and of course noticed by many, is the similarity in the political disputes that India and the U.S. witness.

Moreover, there is at least partial similarity, also marked by many, in the styles of Modi and Trump, both of whom seem to enjoy the mic, the camera, and theatrics.

Not all the likenesses between India and America are concurrent, however. Thus it was a long time ago that the U.S. witnessed parallels to India’s current “love jihad” fever. In at least 16 American states, persons of different races could not legally marry until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the so-called anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. Connoting a “risky” mixing of genes and races, the term miscegenation had been coined during the Civil War (1861-65) by slavery defenders who warned that freeing slaves would result in interracial marriages. If California had been one of those 16 states, Tamil Nadu’s Shyamala Gopalan, who as a 19-year-old had immigrated there in 1958, could not have married Donald Harris, an immigrant from Jamaica in 1963. But that was not the case. Shyamala and Donald could and did marry, and Kamala Harris, born to the couple in 1964, is today on the cusp of being sworn in as America’s Vice-President.

In earlier decades, America had witnessed wide dissemination of the bogey of African American males desiring White women. That spectre upended actual history, where male slaveholders forced Black female slaves to bear their children, thereby creating the great bulk of America’s lighter-skinned Blacks. Today’s desi tale of Muslim males supposedly seducing Hindu females in a widespread “love jihad” conspiracy resembles the bogey to which White America had been receptive before the 1960s. However, I haven’t yet found an American parallel, current or historical, for the sick story being circulated in India of a large conspiracy among Muslim males for trapping Hindu females so as to (a) increase the Muslim percentage in India’s population and (b) bring terrorists to birth.

Human beings falling in love with, and wanting to marry, a pardesi or a bahri, somebody outside one’s traditional circle, is something that everyone understands. Males duping females of any circle for sex, property or money is also, unfortunately, something known to all eras and every society. But would anyone believe that young Indian men who desperately need work (to feed parents, grandparents, siblings, perhaps other relatives, and themselves) would spend time and energy plotting to seduce an “outsider” female merely in order to increase the percentage in the population of their community? And to patiently and carefully raise terrorists at home?

Some would indeed believe such a tale. Such as those who’ve been brainwashed to think of another caste or community as people who are unnecessary when they’re not a menace. They are dangerous, or expendable, or both.

It is not at all unthinkable that people would organize a racket for ensnaring women. But it is unthinkable that a giant scale “love jihad” racket has been running in India for years, eluding not merely the families involved but also the country’s huge, talented and suspicious police forces. It is also hard to accept that such a racket has persuaded a large number of poor Muslim males to capture and convert unsuspecting Hindu women for the sake of census figures, and for producing terrorists.

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