Excerpted with permission from Love Jihad and Other Fictions: Simple Facts to Counter Viral Falsehoods, published by Aleph.
Shah Rukh Khan is one of Bollywood’s biggest stars. His movies are cultural touchstones, watched and rewatched across generations. At last count, he had 43 million followers on Twitter and nearly as many on Instagram. The adoration for him transcends boundaries, within and outside India.
But go by this Facebook post, and Khan is guilty of ‘population jihad’, supposedly a Muslim plot to overrun India’s Hindu majority by producing more children.
The evidence to back this implausible-sounding claim? None. Just the fact that Khan is the Muslim parent of three children is presented as proof of the thesis.
If this seems fantastical, consider this tweet.
It accuses another Bollywood superstar, Aamir Khan, of being the ‘brand ambassador of love jihad’, a theory that claims Muslims are scheming to alter India’s demography by seducing and converting Hindu women.
Again, the only evidence offered in support of this assertion are the religious identities of Khan and his former partners: while he is a Muslim man, they are Hindu women. Net result: ‘love jihad’.
It isn’t just the real lives of Bollywood stars that are grist to the WhatsApp mill. Even a fictional movie plot has been harnessed as evidence for yet another popular theory—Muslim appeasement, or the idea that Muslims are favoured over others.
According to this WhatsApp forward, there was no electricity in the fictional village in which the blockbuster movie Sholay (1975) was set. And while a Hindu character (the Thakur) roamed around in the dark, the loudspeaker at the mosque came alive during the time of namaz. Why? Because the screenwriter of Sholay was Javed Akhtar, a Muslim.
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As journalists, we have spent a significant part of our professional lives examining the claims made by politicians, governments, and corporations: the conventional matrix of power.
In this book, however, we have chosen to turn our focus to a set of viral claims seemingly landing from nowhere in the WhatsApp chats and social media feeds of millions of Indians every day. Their proliferation signals a bizarre new normal, in which Shah Rukh Khan can be accused of ‘population jihad’ and Aamir Khan of ‘love jihad’, only because they are Muslim.
These conspiracy theories aren’t new. They have lurked in the shadows of India’s public square for decades. But they have now taken centre stage. Carried on the wings of social media, they operate in insidious ways. Unlike, say, an overblown government press release, which invites scepticism because it is seen as serving the interests of those in power, these conspiracy theories are often shared by people in our personal circles. The source could be a neighbour, a friend, a colleague, an ex-classmate or a relative, which creates the illusion of intimate endorsement. Courtesy this subterfuge, the narrative these theories push—of India’s Hindu majority under threat from minorities—has seeped into the bones of our society, almost becoming the common sense of our times.
Yet for all their supposed ‘organic’ nature, the link between these viral theories and the formal apparatus of power is no secret. India is currently ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is part of a network of Hindutva organizations led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and called the Sangh Parivar. Sharing its philosophy are scores of individuals and groups who advocate the idea that India is first and foremost a nation of Hindus, a fact that its religious minorities must accept. This book collectively calls them the Hindu Right.
Sreenivasan Jain, Mariyam Alavi, and Supriya Sharma
Love Jihad and Other Fictions: Simple Facts to Counter Viral Falsehoods
Aleph Book Company, 2024
‘Population jihad’ or ‘love jihad’ are constructs of the Hindu Right. Nowadays they are routinely platformed by high-ranking politicians, government functionaries, and wide swathes of the mainstream media. Some of these conspiracies have even been passed into law. Today’s WhatsApp forward, astonishingly, can become tomorrow’s legislation.
But what are the facts on which these constructs are based? What is the evidence to back them?
Is there something real here that we had missed all along? We decided to bring hard-nosed journalistic scrutiny to Hindutva conspiracy theories, much in the way we would probe allegations of political corruption or corporate embezzlement. We filed Right to Information requests, looked up government records, searched through parliamentary questions, contacted leaders of the BJP and Sangh Parivar, read up academic research, and did on-the-ground reportage.
We realized early on, though, that investigating Hindutva conspiracy theories was like entering a hall of mirrors—how can you disprove a theory if you can’t pin it down? This haziness partly stems from the fact that while many endorse these theories, no one claims ownership over them. Moreover, they are vaguely defined. For instance, the label of ‘love jihad’ can be applied to a seemingly infinite number of cases, making the task of fact-checking akin to a game of whack-a-mole— you manage to debunk one, and ten new ones show up. A new theory, or a sub-plot of an old theory, is born every day.
Given the impossibility of examining every single conspiracy theory, we picked the most enduring, commonly cited ones. (By the time the book is published, even these may have mutated.)
Chapter One takes on ‘love jihad’, perhaps the most ascendant of all the theories—there is even a movie on it, endorsed by the Prime Minister of India. But where did it all start? To find out, we probe what is held up as the Patient Zero case of ‘love jihad’. We also investigate arguably the only definitive list of ‘love jihad’ cases. Through our RTI search, we zoom in on the Indian state that has made the largest number of arrests under the anti-‘love jihad’ law. We travel to the ground to explore: is the crackdown justified? ‘Population jihad’ is the rare theory where its proponents cite government data to back their astonishing claim—that Muslims are waging a holy war by producing more children and infiltrating India’s borders. But does the data actually bear out the claim? In Chapter Two, we crunch the numbers and trawl through parliamentary records to decode whether Muslims will indeed outnumber over a billion Hindus in the near future.
It’s not just Muslims who are in the crosshairs of viral theories. In Chapter Three, we scrutinize the Hindutva claim of a sinister Christian scheme to take over India through mass forced conversions. Is it true that Christian evangelists even managed to deceitfully convert the mother of a legislator in a southern Indian state? Was a student of a convent school forced to take her life because of the pressure to convert? Our ground investigation throws up answers.
Remember the far-fetched allegation related to Sholay at the beginning of this introduction, of Muslims being favoured when it comes to electricity supply? Chapter Four, which examines the claim of Muslim appeasement, begins with a real-world example of a strikingly similar accusation levelled by a top BJP leader—that a state run by a rival political party supplied more power on Eid as compared to Diwali.To fact- check the claim, we analyse decade-long electricity data. We also probe the long-standing tenets that prop up the charge of Muslim appeasement—hajj subsidy, funds to madrasas, and the favourite bugbear of the Hindu Right: Muslim men being able to take up to four wives.
So what’s new, some readers may argue. These theories have been around for a long while.Why are we tackling them now? The short answer to this: because more than ever before, they now have the backing of power. A phenomenon we examine in the epilogue of this book, using data on the aftermath of India’s ‘pink revolution’ moment, and the surge in VIP hate speech.
To make it easier to navigate the material, the structure of the book follows the fact-checking template.We have treated every conspiracy theory as a series of claims made by the Hindu Right. Each claim has been investigated separately, and we present a conclusion at the end of every section.We have included an exhaustive list of sources in the endnotes to the book.
We are writing this book in deeply polarized times. It is possible that some readers may perceive our focus to be selective or agenda driven. This is partly a reflection of the success of these conspiracy theories.Their flood is so relentless that even sensible Indians—who in our view constitute India’s vast majority—have been primed to buy into them, and may see our questioning stance itself as a reflection of bias.
All we can say to that is: please read the book before you decide.
Sreenivasan Jain is a New Delhi-based journalist and broadcaster. In a career spanning three decades, he has reported on wars, elections, insurgencies, majoritarianism, and corruption scandals for the television network NDTV where he worked till early 2023. His investigative work and ground reportage have been recognised by the Ramnath Goenka Awards, Red Ink Awards, and New York Festivals, among others.
Mariyam Alavi has reported on many of the Hindutva conspiracy theories scrutinized in this book. She worked with NDTV in New Delhi until March 2023, where she also reported on the economy, politics, and minority rights. She is the recipient of the International Press Institute-India’s Award for Excellence in Journalism.
Supriya Sharma has spent two decades covering conflict, politics, and development. Her reports have fetched several honours, including the Ramnath Goenka Awards and Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Woman Journalist, among others. She is currently the Executive Editor of Scroll. She lives in Delhi