Maharashtra panel to track interfaith marriages threatens to limit personal freedoms can be weaponised against minorities

Maharashtra panel to track interfaith marriages threatens to limit personal freedoms can be weaponised against minorities

In a country increasingly becoming constrained by a narrow imagination of uniformity, Mumbai is still maya nagari — a cauldron of multi-ethnic, multilingual and multi-cultural aspirations. To try to inhibit that idea of openness and possibility by casting communal aspersions on personal choice is a travesty.

Following a report in this newspaper, the Maharashtra government has decided to limit the mandate of the recently constituted Intercaste/Interfaith Marriage-Family Coordination Committee (state level) to gathering information on interfaith marriages. The renamed Interfaith Marriage-Family Coordination Committee under the state Women and Child Development Ministry will, besides providing support and rehabilitation when necessary, ostensibly track fraud committed in the name of “love jihad”, the majoritarian paranoia of choice, that has found new assertion in the wake of the alleged murder of Vasai resident Shraddha Walkar by her partner Aftab Poonawala in New Delhi. With states such as Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand already having brought in anti-conversion legislation, the decision of the Maharashtra government is only the latest to add to the clamour for action against “love jihad”, whose spectre has been put to efficient political use over the last decade.

Such vigilance remains yet another indication of the State’s disproportionately burgeoning — and utterly unacceptable — interest in, and demand for, control over the lives of individual citizens. In its imagination of intended malice, it is not just violative of one’s rights of freedom and equality, it also reeks of misogyny in its steadfast denial of a woman’s choice of partner as her own free will and not an act of coercion. There is the IPC for all genuine complaints so the committee could be weaponised. In every aspect, monitoring of a citizen’s life for her own supposed benefit is a cautionary tale, a limitation of the freedoms of men and women, designed to deter them from leading fuller, freer lives.

The marriage between politics and communalism is not a new phenomenon, especially in a state that has been witness to one of the worst communal riots in Indian history or where politics of nativism had thrived on amping up parochial sentiments. Yet, for all that the state has witnessed, its capital remains a place of hope and freedom, anachronistic in its defiance of self-limiting labels. In a country increasingly becoming constrained by a narrow imagination of uniformity, Mumbai is still maya nagari — a cauldron of multi-ethnic, multilingual and multi-cultural aspirations — where people come to lose themselves in the anonymity it offers, and find themselves in the opportunities that it holds out. To try to inhibit that idea of openness and possibility by casting communal aspersions on personal choice is a travesty.