Why 'Bhaichara' Fails to Counter the False Bogey of 'Love Jihad'

The brutal lynching of 20-year-old Suleman Pathan in Jalgaon, Maharashtra, reportedly for meeting with a Hindu girl in a café, once again brings into focus the powerful hatred unleashed by the “love jihad” discourse in the state. Reportedly, some of the accused were Pathan’s closest friends, from his village, with whom he had spent his entire life. The village itself, with over 600 Hindu households and only four Muslim households, has no major history of communal strife.

The false bogey of “Love jihad” by all measures has been an extremely effective tool of Hindu nationalist propaganda. It has sparked large scale communal riots in Muzaffarnagar, manufactured consent for the enactment of anti-conversion laws in several states in India, and has been responsible for fragmenting once powerful electoral coalitions (like the MAJGAR in Western Uttar Pradesh) along religious lines. But perhaps most painfully, as demonstrated in Suleman Pathan’s case, “love jihad” can trigger brutal violence that overrides all considerations, including lifelong friendship or the syncretic sharing of festivals.

Even friendships, like Suleman Pathan’s, which were forged in the shadow of Hindu nationalism were not strong enough to save his life. For many years, the idea of “bhaichara” or brotherhood between Hindus and Muslims, centering around celebrating a syncretic shared culture has been posited as an ideological counter to the racialised fearmongering of “love jihad”. Pathan’s case highlights that this is often not enough.

While the alarming rise in the frequency of anti- Muslim hate speech over the last three years in Maharashtra has certainly played a role, understanding why “love jihad” propaganda is so effective at creating violence that overrides all considerations of basic humanity, requires us to delve deeper.

Scholars generally agree that audiences for propaganda are not a blank canvas. What they believe, and what they can be made to believe, also depends on their pre-existing values, prejudices and modes of thinking. “Love jihad” propaganda layers violent Islamophobia and hate speech on top of a base built by three other beliefs, that are widely held in a caste-based society. First, that caste endogamy is central to the maintenance of power. Second, that it is acceptable to control women’s bodies to maintain caste endogamy. Third, that brutal violence committed by non-state actors is legitimate if committed to enforce the rules of the caste system.

Caste endogamy

M.N Srinivas points out that castes in traditional caste-based society are separated by endogamy and commensality – they marry only within their own caste and share cooked food and water only with members of their own caste. They associate with other castes in a hierarchical manner. This complete separation of castes, and the resultant hierarchy, can only be maintained by strict endogamy.

Endogamy both increases solidarity within the caste, as well as denies an opportunity to forge solidarity across caste lines through marriage. As a result of this, there is a propensity in caste Hindu society to believe that any attempt by a “lower” caste to marry into a “higher” caste is not a simple act of love, but a collective challenge to the power of the “higher” caste.

While modernisation and urbanisation have somewhat altered practices with respect to the sharing of cooked food, caste endogamy has remained largely untouched. As late as in 2011, the rate of inter-caste marriages in India was a little under 6%. While it is common in election season to see “upper” caste Hindu politicians making a spectacle of eating in a Dalit household with journalists tagging along to photograph the moment, you will almost never find the same politicians presiding over an inter-caste marriage of a Dalit man or woman, even just for the sake of the cameras.

While the rules related to commensality can be compromised for the optics of an election, the rules relating to endogamy always remain strictly enforced, including by violence. Between 2017 and 2021, data reported in parliament indicates that there have been 221 caste related “honour” murders reported across the country.

The rise of caste justice politics has not seriously dented this. For example, the early anti-caste political movements were moderately successful in both Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra in redistributing power from brahmins to non-brahmin dominant castes. However, as the unit of this upward mobility remained caste, endogamy remained critical. Both states are still plagued by caste related honour killings.

In Tamil Nadu, a striking feature of these cases is how common it is for the victims to be well known to the assailants – often they are classmates, or the family of a partner that they have met several times. The Justice Chandru One Man Committee report points to multiple such instances. As in Suleman Pathan’s case, these friendships do not protect them from, or even dilute the brutality of, the violence unleashed when caste endogamy is threatened.

In 2016, the film Sairat, whose plot centers around an inter-caste couple who are eventually murdered by the girl’s family became the highest grossing Marathi film ever. And yet, instead of sparking positive conversations around caste endogamy and honour killings, the film became a blueprint for caste violence in Maharashtra.

In 2024 a young Dalit man was killed by his in-laws. His wife testified that her parents had threatened them with a “Sairat like” end. In 2021, a pregnant 19-year-old in an inter-caste marriage was beheaded by her family in Aurangabad, who, inspired by the plot of Sairat, pretended to want reconciliation with their daughter to be able to access her home.

In the years prior to “love jihad” propaganda, while interfaith unions were far from welcome, it was generally believed by Hindus, quite correctly, that such unions are widely discouraged by Muslims as well. 2021 Pew research found that less than 1% of Indians of any faith were married to people raised outside their own faith. Over 76% of Muslims believed that it was very important to stop men from marrying outside the community. Interestingly, for Hindus, the corresponding number was 65%, which closely mirrors the 63% who believe that it is important to stop men from marrying outside their caste.

“Love jihad” propaganda has changed that. It uses intense Islamophobia and wild exaggerations about the number of inter-faith relationships to paint interfaith relationships as a planned power grab by Muslims. As caste Hindu society is already trained to think of endogamy as the only way to maintain their own power, there is a high propensity to believe this.

As brutal violence is already legitimised to maintain endogamy, the same brutality (amplified by Islamophobia) is unleashed on Muslim men. These men may be in relationships with Hindu women, simply happen to be in vicinity of Hindu women, or, as in the 2017 case of Mohamad Afrazul, be accused entirely randomly. Other factors, like the communalisation of the security discourse in India also feed into “love jihad” conspiracies. For example, in the 2017 Hadiya case, an interfaith marriage and conversion sparked an NIA investigation into ISIS links (none were found).

As we have seen in Suleman Pathan’s case, ideas of friendship, brotherhood, or syncretic ideas of shared culture are rarely strong enough to counter this toxic combination.

Control over women’s bodies

The caste system based on strict segregation cannot survive without endogamy, and this endogamy cannot be ensured without exercising control over women’s bodies – through both social and psychological conditioning, and if that fails, through violence. This violence is twofold. The first type of violence is used to prevent women from straying outside the bounds of caste (the used of so-called honour killings to punish those who do).

The second type is violence committed on women already in these endogamous marriages, like dowry demands, domestic violence, coercive control, forcing women in front of caste panchayats to resolve marital issues, and the refusal to criminalise marital rape all of which collectively keep women trapped in these marriages.

In Annihilation of Caste, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar points out how public support for Hindu reform work tended to centre around what he called family reform – women’s rights, widow remarriage, raising the age of marriage, women’s education – and avoided social reform like challenging the caste system. Caste endogamy sits at the intersection of the two.

The public popularity of the women’s rights discourse in post-colonial India has also mirrored this dichotomy. Despite the efforts of feminist movements in India, liberatory discourse still tends to receive far more popular support when it is framed in terms of public safety, women’s education or representation at the workplace, and does not touch directly on bodily autonomy, endogamy or marriage.

Decentralised violence

In a traditional caste-based society, caste norms are enforced locally, without the involvement of the sovereign, using two tools: physical violence and complete social boycotts. Such violence enjoys broad social legitimacy, if it is seen as enforcing caste laws. Most modern states on the other hand reserve to themselves the power to commit legitimate violence.

While both the colonial state and the post-colonial state in India have attempted to curb this tendency to decentralised violence, these efforts have only met with partial success. Panchayats in Indian villages continue to enjoy wide powers to enforce caste rules using violence, which are rarely challenged by the formal policing system.

In the last decade, the rise of Hindutva “vigilante groups” that are often accompanied by the police, rarely face criminal prosecution, and easily access bail in the rare cases that they do, has served to further legitimise this decentralised violence. The enactment of laws that curb what these groups claim to be preventing (including interfaith marriage) means that the victims of such violence are more likely to face legal prosecution than the perpetrators.

There is a tendency in Indian political discourse to reduce solidarities to electoral voting patterns and alliances. This is often not helpful. Many Hindu women actively support Hindutva even when it places curbs on their own bodily autonomy. Hindutva has also made electoral inroads into Dalit and backward caste voters. Indian progressives and Muslims also often vote for “secular” parties, whose record with caste violence is abysmal.

This excessive focus on voting patterns often distracts from the fact that, in essence, Hindutva is a reactionary ideology that works to harden and expand the existing prejudices of a caste-based society to exercise dominance over other faiths. A comprehensive ideological struggle against Hindutva will therefore always be fundamentally linked to the struggle against caste, and patriarchy.

Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.

Missing Link is her column on the social aspects of the events that move India.

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