The Gujarati Queen of Hearts

One Indian couple’s decade-long legal battle against “Love Jihad”.

JANUARY 16, 2024

The sun burned warmer on Pinky every day, reminding her that the gentle winter of 2023 would be gone soon. She had married Tariq in November 2022, after they had been together for nearly a decade, but she had not yet been able to move in with him. Instead, Pinky moved from one house to another every few weeks while Tariq lived in their village near Vadodara, in the Indian state of Gujarat. Every time they planned for Pinky to join him in the village, Tariq’s cousin Samar warned them not to: He told them it would not only endanger their lives but could also cause trouble among their neighbors. The activist Hozefa Ujjaini told Pinky of nearby villages that had erupted in violence or shut down because Hindu girls like her had tried to marry Muslim boys like Tariq.  

In 2013, when Pinky’s father first found out that she was dating a Muslim boy, he screamed, “Couldn’t you find anyone else to be with?” Even then, the imperative to “protect” Hindu women from the advances of Muslim men was emerging as a priority of India’s rising right-wing parties. It began with a range of volunteer groups mobilizing to strengthen Hindu religious and cultural identity. These groups included the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), Bajrang Dal (the VHP’s youth wing), Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (Hindu Awakening Committee)  and others, all of which overlap in message and membership with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Nationalist Volunteer Group), a 98-year-old Hindu nationalist group connected with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. As India’s religious wars escalated, the issue of intermarriage gradually moved to the center of the political battleground, helping bring the BJP to power in the central government and in many Indian states.

Pinky spotted Tariq, who had slipped in despite the new bans on Muslim men attending the festival to potentially entice Hindu women. As she blinked and stared, the surging dance seemed to halt. The two had fallen back in love more feverishly than before.

These right-wing Hindu groups, often known collectively as the Sangh Parivar or Sangh family, argue that Muslim men attempt to entrap Hindu women in order to convert them to Islam and gradually turn India’s Hindu majority into a minority. Right-wing politicians refer to this threat as “love jihad,” mobilizing the terminology of religious warfare to police private lives. “Earlier, if a woman married outside her religion, it was a matter of shame for the family — now it is a national danger,” said Kathinka Frøystad, a professor at the University of Oslo who studies this phenomenon. “We have to understand that anxiety to protect Hinduism.”

But Pinky had made up her mind about Tariq. Over the decade to come, she would have to contend with her family’s opposition, community protests and legal challenges in order to be with him. 

Pinky and Tariq are among several couples who agreed to share their stories to illustrate the right-wing campaign against interreligious couples in India. “Pinky” and “Tariq” are pseudonyms. They asked that we withhold their real names because even after all these years together, they remain fearful for their safety.

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Pinky had grown up as a girl who behaved like a boy. She sneaked away for snacks on days when girls were supposed to fast, and wore her hair short. 

She said she will never forget the day she first met Tariq, when she was 15 years old. It was a sweltering post-monsoon afternoon in 2013, and Pinky was drinking at her school’s water cooler when she saw a handkerchief on the ground.

Seeing a long-haired man walking away, she ran after him and said, “Uncle, you left your handkerchief here!”

“Aunty, give it back to me,” he snapped. 

She said she remembers thinking, “Who is this calling me aunty?” as her cheeks turned hot with anger.

Tariq found out later that the girl who had humiliated him by calling him “uncle” around his friends was only a year below him, in ninth grade. Tall, loose-limbed and known for wearing funky clothes and moving to his own beat, Tariq began hanging out outside her classroom so she could see he was not an uncle. When he didn’t see her one day, Tariq walked to her house. He was enveloped in a dusky sunset glow by the time she came to the window.

Tariq began borrowing Samar’s beat-up blue van to skip school so he and Pinky could vanish from prying eyes. They got caught skipping school to hang out at the gardens in Godhra. Pinky’s father stopped sending her to school after that. Her parents moved her back to their village in Rajasthan and took away her cellphone. She lost touch with Tariq. “I thought everything was over,” Pinky told me.

In October 2015, Pinky’s family returned to Vadodara for its glittering Navratri festival: nine days and nine nights of dancing and revelry to honor the nine forms of the goddess Durga, who were said to have battled and vanquished the demon Mahishasur. Amid the dancers, Pinky spotted Tariq, who had slipped in despite the new bans on Muslim men attending the festival to potentially entice Hindu women. As she blinked and stared, the surging dance seemed to halt. The two had fallen back in love more feverishly than before.  

The more recent love jihad campaign is an attempt to create a different India, one that seeks to reclaim its religious identity and cast off the pluralism that its supporters view as a colonial imposition.

In April 2016, Pinky and Tariq eloped. They stayed with friends in Mumbai, then Nasik, then Akkalkua. In Malegaon, they lived in a small house amid a field outside town, refilling an empty water tank and swimming in it. Freedom mingled with fear, which they doused with marriage. That May, Pinky converted to Islam. In June, they had an Islamic religious ceremony followed by a court wedding in Malegaon under India’s 1954 Special Marriage Act, which allows couples from different faiths to marry without religious conversion. Although marrying in both religious and civil ceremonies was not strictly required, Pink and Tariq wanted to do everything they could to make the marriage official. Pinky also petitioned the High Court of Gujarat for protection, saying they faced threats due to their interreligious marriage.  

Days later, they returned to their village in the dead of night. The police apprehended them soon after they entered a friend’s house, and arrested Tariq.

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Since Pinky and Tariq first met, 12 of India’s 28 states have passed laws to curb religious conversion, and at least two additional states are currently considering similar measures. Apart from state governments, Hindu social groups have mounted their own effort to “protect” Hindu women. The Special Marriage Act requires notices of interreligious marriages to be posted at the local registrar’s office for a month prior to the day of the wedding. Right-wing Hindu groups often photograph these marriage notices and make them go viral on social media alongside calls to halt the scheduled weddings. This effort has led to several weddings being canceled. The Special Marriage Act was passed four years after India’s constitution went into effect. It was part of the project to create an India that was pluralistic and multiethnic. The more recent love jihad campaign is an attempt to create a different India, one that seeks to reclaim its religious identity and cast off the pluralism that its supporters view as a colonial imposition.

Several interreligious couples I spoke to told me how the Special Marriage Act’s public notice requirement posed an obstacle to their marriages. One of them told me of how right-wing activists had photographed their marriage notice, posted it on WhatsApp groups and then approached the woman’s parents.

Since the ’90s, Hindu organizations such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal have sought to “protect” women from the advances of Muslim men in Gujarat and other states. Activists had a growing presence in their villages, organizing rallies, giving speeches, protesting interfaith marriages, bringing back women to be remarried to Hindus and pushing authorities to act against the men. This also seeped into the discourse of the BJP, the ruling party.

This message flowed through right-wing social media groups, activists and politicians, including ministers. Last year, the Bollywood film “The Kerala Story” — which centers on a fragile Hindu nursing student who converts to Islam, joins the Islamic State group and then ends up in an Afghan jail — grossed 230 crore ($27 million), making it one of the highest-grossing films released in India in 2023. Activists organized public rallies across the country to reinforce the movie’s message, and politicians spoke about it. For instance, Maharashtra’s then-Minister of Women and Child Development Mangal Prabhat Lodha said earlier this year that there were more than 100,000 cases of love jihad in the state, although there are fewer than 3,700 interfaith marriages registered in the state, not all between Hindus and Muslims and not all forced.

Several interreligious couples I spoke to told me how the Special Marriage Act’s public notice requirement posed an obstacle to their marriages. One of them told me of how right-wing activists had photographed their marriage notice, posted it on WhatsApp groups and then approached the woman’s parents. Her parents called her back home on a pretext and kept her there until she missed her own wedding. She later eloped, married and moved abroad, and was in the middle of a slow and painful rapprochement with her parents. A Muslim law professor told me he and his Hindu girlfriend were putting off marriage to avoid the pain and harassment it could bring. Converting to either religion could seem coercive, he said, speaking almost to himself: “Ambedkar” — who wrote India’s constitution — “also converted his religion. There is freedom of religion and freedom to convert enshrined in the constitution.” Marrying under the Special Marriage Act could lead to the public wedding notice going viral, allegations of the marriage being forced and attempts to halt it. “It is only getting harder,” he said of his marriage prospects.

Tariq seemed afraid but also convinced that Pinky would say she loved him and had married him willingly, ending his jail term. Weeks later, Pinky’s statement arrived in court: She said Tariq had taken her away against her will. 

Faced with shame, Pinky’s parents produced school records showing she was not yet 18, still a minor, when she married Tariq. Tariq was charged with kidnapping Pinky; raping, assaulting and harassing a minor; and threatening a member of one of the country’s scheduled tribes, Indigenous tribes who are protected by the constitution, to which Pinky belongs.

On June 25, 2016, Tariq was taken to a police station in the small Rajasthan town where Pinky’s parents had filed the complaint. The station’s grounds had filled up with sloganeering Hindu activists all day. The town stayed tense. Pinky and Tariq’s story was reported as a love jihad case in the local newspaper.

Samar visited Tariq in jail and told him that being convicted on such charges could lead to a lifetime in jail. Tariq seemed afraid but also convinced that Pinky would say she loved him and had married him willingly, ending his jail term. Weeks later, Pinky’s statement arrived in court: She said Tariq had taken her away against her will.  

Tariq spent three months in jail while Samar appealed in courts for his bail. Samar brought Pinky’s school certificate, which showed that she was 10 months older than what the school records her parents submitted indicated, making her an adult when she married Tariq. On Sept. 23, 2016, a High Court order released Tariq on bail. Samar spent the six-hour drive home telling Tariq to forget Pinky. Tariq refused, telling his cousin that he couldn’t be with anyone else.

On one of his trips back to Rajasthan for court hearings, Tariq delivered a cellphone to Pinky. Tearfully, she told Tariq she had signed the statement because her family had promised to drop the charges against him if she did so. She began hiding her phone in her blanket, carrying it to the bathroom, taking it out into the fields around the house to speak to Tariq even as he fought court accusations that he had kidnapped and raped her. They spoke up to 15 times a day over video calls, with Pinky disapproving of his long hair and T-shirts and approving of dress shirts, ripped jeans, high-top sneakers that Tariq saved up to buy for himself.

In early 2019, Pinky traveled with her parents and grandparents to testify in Tariq’s case. Her family waited outside while the judge and court reporter recorded Pinky’s statement. She told them she had eloped with Tariq of her own will, and with those words proved his innocence.

“Do you think love is a thing?” Niraj Jain asked me. Jain is a Vadodara-based lawyer with a large social media following who is affiliated with Hindu Jagran Manch, a Hindu activist group, Before I could fumble for a response, he answered his own question: “There is no such thing as love. … Hindu girls are innocent. These boys lure them and then throw them away, feed them to the dogs.” Love, he seemed to be suggesting, could only be a form of entrapment, with disastrous consequences.

This form of rhetoric harkens back to centuries-old accounts of Muslim rulers attacking Hindus, their deities and women. In 2013, Tariq was jailed in Chittorgarh, a town known for its looming stone fortress, which had been attacked by a Muslim king in 1303, in part for its beautiful Hindu queen. She was said to have burned herself in a mass pyre rather than submit herself to him.

In 2021, a Pew Research Center poll found that just 1 percent of all Indians marry outside their religion, and 65 percent of respondents said they felt that interreligious marriages had to be stopped. India’s economic boom in the 2000s brought with it renewed worries that a period of financial prosperity would weaken traditional values and social mores. Pramod Muthalik, a former member of Bajrang Dal who later formed the Rashtriya Hindu Sena to “protect” Hindu women and fight the onslaught of Westernization in the southern state of Karnataka, coined the term “love jihad” in 2005, according to Charu Gupta, a history professor at the University of Delhi. In doing so, he created a modern term that sought to articulate a deep, old fear.

Muthalik had been unable to join the BJP because his views fell much further right of the party. But his campaign against love jihad grew across the country. A flashpoint for the rising tensions came in 2015 when Akhila, a 24-year-old homeopathy student from Kerala, decided to convert to Islam, rename herself Hadiya and marry Shafin Jahan, a Muslim man. Her father believed she had been radicalized and could be taken abroad. He moved the Kerala High Court to intervene. It kept her under parental guardianship and then annulled the marriage. Eventually, Hadiya herself appeared before the Supreme Court and told the judges that she had married Shafin and converted to Islam of her own will. In March 2018, the Supreme Court overruled the annulment and upheld Hadiya’s right to choose her partner and religion.

Although Muthalik’s term has been adopted by right-wing groups across India, he has had a harder time endearing himself to the public. In early 2023, Muthalik ran in the state assembly election in Karnataka. “I would like to invite the youth here,” he said at a rally in February. “If we lose one Hindu girl, we should trap 10 Muslim girls. If you do so, the Sri Ram Sena will take responsibility for you and provide every kind of security and employment.” He lost the election, coming in third of 13 candidates. Yet the epithet he coined is more popular than ever, and has even spawned a range of variations, including land jihad, COVID jihad and spit jihad —the beliefs that, respectively, Muslims try to capture Indian land, spread COVID among Hindus and spit on them as a means of establishing their religious supremacy.  

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After Pinky’s testimony exonerated Tariq, her life became much more difficult. Activists, the village chief and others came over to tell Pinky’s father that she had brought shame to the family. Her father’s anger poured out on her. In 2021, Pinky wrote a letter to her district’s collector saying she wanted to continue her studies and did not want to be forced into an arranged marriage as her family desired. She asked to be freed of her family’s plans for her. Police arrived at their house, at the collector’s direction, and took her away. She was sent to a women’s shelter in Jaipur, where she enrolled herself in a master’s program. Later, she left to do a beautician’s course in Ahmedabad.      

There, she and Tariq began planning to register their marriage again. Pinky lived with friends for months and used an Ahmedabad address to register their marriage notice so her parents would not discover her plans. Ujjaini, the activist, told Tariq not to be seen in Ahmedabad during the month the marriage notice was displayed to avoid possible charges of kidnapping. 

The night before their wedding, Tariq arrived in the city, and the couple walked together through one of the city’s famed open-air markets. Pinky picked out a red salwar kameez filled with gold embroidery for the ceremony.   

On the morning of Nov. 1, 2022, they arrived separately to the boxy court building in the old part of the city. Wearing her heavy new clothes, Pinky walked slowly up the packed courtroom stairs where everyone seemed to be in a hurry. She had waited nearly 10 years to get here.

They signed their marriage papers and went back to separate homes, waiting for weeks for things to stay uneventful. Pinky spent anxious and lonely weeks in friends’ houses, then Tariq brought her home to live with his family. She discovered she was pregnant soon afterward. For months, they thought of having a small wedding reception, but they postponed it for fear it could stir up trouble.

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I met Pinky, Tariq and his cousin Samar over a long lunch in a gleaming Vadodara mall in July. Heavily pregnant, Pinky had slipped off her slides and sat cross-legged on the plastic mall seat for comfort. Every so often, Tariq looked toward her and asked with his eyes if she needed anything, while Pinky kept up an animated chatter on all that had unfolded in their lives. When I asked if they had thought of breaking up through those years, both shook their heads to say no. When you hit a ball hard again a wall it rebounds harder, Samar told me. That is what happened with Pinky and Tariq, he said. The troubles they went through had only brought them closer.

Women bear the brunt of these restrictions. “Both of us went through a lot,” Pinky told me. “But I went through a lot more.”

Fighting the court case had consumed years of Tariq’s life and plunged him into debt, but he had also opened Funky Boy, a men’s store that sells jeans with patches stitched on, T-shirts and sneakers. It had been a nearly instant success, allowing him to build a home for himself and Pinky. (His parents also moved in with them.) Sometimes when Pinky speaks to her sister and brother on the phone, she can tell that her parents are nearby. These phone calls are the extent of her family’s contact with her since she left home.      

Days after I met them, right-wing groups asked hotels in the state not to rent rooms to non-Hindu men who wanted rooms with Hindu women. Gujarat’s chief minister asked state officials to explore if parental consent could be made a prerequisite for marriages, to keep Hindu women from marrying outside their religion. He had previously tried amending a religious conversion law to say district officials would have to approve of religious conversions related to marriage, but this was held in abeyance after a court appeal by the Minority Coordination Committee, an Ahmedabad-based group that fights legal cases to protect the rights of religious minorities and has opposed the Gujarat government’s anti-conversion measures. In the neighboring state of Maharashtra, the government also announced a plan to form a committee that would assess whether marriage-related religious conversions were voluntary.

In April, India’s Supreme Court heard a petition to stop requiring the monthlong public display of marriage notices for interreligious unions at registrars’ offices. The suit was filed by Athira Sujatha, a Hindu woman from Kerala who had planned to marry her Muslim boyfriend under the Special Marriage Act in December 2019. The two had dated for 13 years, and their parents supported them. But their marriage notice had been photographed at the registrar’s office along with 120 other notices, and it was circulated widely on right-wing WhatsApp groups. Sujatha had gone ahead with the marriage, but in 2022, she filed a petition asking for the display of such notices to be stopped.

During the six-day-long hearing, India’s Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud said: “The very object of the Special Marriage Act is to protect couples. But these provisions lay them open to invasion by society, by District Magistrates and Superintendents of Police.”

Sujatha's petition was heard alongside a different motion seeking to allow people of all genders to marry. The judges heard the arguments and then declined to issue a judgment on the question of public notices. In October, the judges also decided not to rule on same-sex marriage, determining that the issue was for India’s Parliament, not the court, to decide. The Supreme Court judges “were invited to liberate interreligious couples from archaic and oppressive laws, but they chose not to,” said Gautam Bhatia, a lawyer and legal commentator who argued for the petition.

When I met Mujahid Nafees, the convenor of the Minority Coordination Committee, at his office opposite the court where Pinky and Tariq married, he told me, “These people don’t believe in love at all,” referring to the state government and groups around it.

Women bear the brunt of these restrictions. “Both of us went through a lot,” Pinky told me. “But I went through a lot more.”

In September, Pinky gave birth to a baby boy. She and Tariq still have not had a wedding reception, but they did hold a small baby shower. Her family did not attend. 

✺ Published in “Issue 12: Sex” of The Dial