Don’t be scared of love marriage

Don’t be scared of love marriage

It may be fallacious to presume what exactly has made the state governments of Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh have sleepless nights and decide that they need to bring in a law to ‘tackle’ conversion of Hindu women to Islam.

Is it marriage to Muslim men, with its deeper notions of ‘cultural purity’ being diluted, or worse? Or is it the act of conversion to Islam, making the marriage merely a means to a bigger conspiratorial, demographical end? Or both? Madhya Pradesh — still an undisputed part of India that constitutionally protects the right of every Indian and (non-Indian) resident of India to practise any religion she chooses —seems to be ahead among petrified states. The shaitan here, too, lies in the perceived details. The state plans to bring in the Dharma Swatantrya Bill 2020, under which ‘coercing someone into marriage by cajoling or pressuring will be made punishable by five-year rigorous imprisonment’. For voluntary conversion for marriage, an application will have to be made a month in advance. Liberty to choose one’s life partner, in other words, is for a babu to grant or refuse.

Haryana home minister Anil Vij has included ‘tempting someone… or trying to do so in the name of love’ as coercion. Does this include buying flowers or saying sweet nothings? Religious conversion is a ‘free market’ choice, protected by Article 25 that inherently provides the right to profess any religion of one’s choice. By using rather alarming terms associated with Islamic ‘striving’, visions of a vast conspiracy that isn’t here are being conjured up. The secular central government should firmly ‘suggest’ that state governments put a lid on this extreme form of ‘arranged marriage’. We are in India, not Pakistan.