Love won’t be lost in jihad

Amit Sengupta

Kerala’s articulate society has refused to paint a love story in communal colours. The Malayalis have argued that inter-faith relationships and marriages are legitimate in a mature and democratic society, and any move to brand the wedding of two adults, Akhila Ashokan turned Hadiya and Shafin Jehan, as ‘love jihad’ won’t be accepted.

It was a packed audience in Calicut on October 30 as the premier of filmmaker Gopal Menon’s documentary was screened: ‘I am Hadiya’. That night, regional channels were full of debates on the controversy. Next day, the Malayalam papers gave the film full display; indeed, more than the film, how the campaign against Hadiya by fledgling Hindutva forces and the vicious rhetoric of ‘love jihad’ was vitiating the pluralist, secular, mature and enlightened social fabric of ‘god’s own country’.

Gopal Menon has always had the reporter’s instinct of picking up ‘newsy’ and ‘breaking news’ themes, even as it becomes a running story and a controversial public narrative. His film, Hey Ram, shot quickly with heart-wrenching shots from ground zero in a difficult and violent terrain, was a current affairs documentary on the Gujarat genocide of 2002. When it was first screened in open air at the Constitution Club in Delhi, by Sahmat, in front of a huge audience, including editors and academics, almost everyone had tears in their eyes, even as the wounds of mass murders, the gang-rapes, the dying and the survivors in the camps were in transparent glare as a tragic and brutal public spectacle of a state-sponsored carnage. The film was later screened all over Delhi, and across the globe, and became a living testimony of the horror that was Gujarat in 2002. He is now off to Cox Bazaar in Bangladesh to shoot a film on the Rohingyas.

The film sparked off a debate in Kerala. Across the spectrum of religion, communities, civil society and women’s groups, people have argued that ‘inter-faith’, inter-caste and ‘inter-religious’ relationships and marriages are legitimate in a mature and democratic society, and any move to brand it as ‘love jihad’, as the Hindutva forces  tried in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh before the 2014 elections, leading to mass exodus of thousands of Muslim families, killings and rapes, will not be allowed in ‘secular Kerala’. No wonder, despite the massive efforts by Amit Shah, BJP chief, and his rank and file, to rake up the issue as a case of conversion and to create communal phobia, has come a cropper in the state. So much so, Shah had to return back quickly, even as the BJP’s ‘long march’ against the communists, refused to take off in Kerala.

“You see, Kerala is a different cultural entity. The RSS has tried very hard for decades, but they have always been marginalised. Now they are trying to create fissures and fears among communities, which does not work here. For instance, our food habits across communities, are almost the same. That is a reflection of our cultural unity. Let the BJP come out against the culinary delights of beef (buff), which they too consume,” said a human rights activist.

Others argued that Hadiya is a qualified homeopathic doctor, she is 24, an adult, and she married and converted willfully and with complete knowledge of her identity. How can then she be branded as weak, unsure and a case of “psychological kidnapping”, as is the term being used by the Hindutva brigade, which is being gleefully picked up by certain news channels in Delhi, without an iota of evidence or objectivity. “It is not a case of compulsory conversion. She has not been enticed, or psychologically pressurised. They are adults and they decided to marry, so why are the Hindutva forces so unhappy about it,” said a woman activist.

A young filmmaker, Ashfaque, who is making a film on mob-lynching with crowd-funding, told this reporter that even in the Muslim community, inter-faith marriages are not happily accepted. In that sense, both the Kerala High Court observation that all inter-faith bonds need not be interpreted as love jihad, and the affirmative position of the civil society on breaking orthodox and conformist barriers is a welcome development. “It is a positive debate. Hadiya should have the choice to live her own life,” he said.

I am Hadiya is a non-partisan, objective documentary, which takes into account all versions and puts them in a perspective. The power of rationality finally scores over blind fanaticism, and the film speaks for itself. Hopefully, the film, as much as the public narrative of the ‘Hadiya isssue’, will mark a turning point in the beautiful and green Kerala, and show the way to the rest of the country where the poison of hate politics, violence against dissent and alternate views and  mob-lynching seems to have become the order of the day.