At the height of the protracted invasion of Afghanistan by the United States of America (USA), there was a flourishing opium cultivation and global trade that sustained and enriched many violent terror groups operating in Afghanistan. Traders, middlemen, financiers and terror groups, all reaped lucrative profits, dealing in opium. However, the opium farmers remained an impoverished lot, heavily indebted to loan sharks and financiers. Having no means of any alternative livelihood, these opium farmers, also had to face the destruction of their poppy fields by the American forces, as also hostile climatic conditions, that could ruin a harvest. These farmers were ever dependent on drug traffickers for periodic loans to meet family expenses and for opium cultivation. In a country that has never known peace and where life itself was uncertain, the traffickers demanded as security, young and nubile girls. Failure to repay the loan along with interest resulted in the girls being carted away for sexual exploitation and being sold off repeatedly to different buyers, to satisfy the carnal desires of lustful terrorists. Every year sees lots of girls being taken away to be sold as sex slaves. These unfortunate victims are called “opium brides”.
Approximately, 2,805 km, almost far south, a similar phenomenon is happening in the state of Kerala in India. It has labelled as “love jihad”.
Over the past decade, social observers in Kerala have noticed the surreptitious trend of Muslim boys luring Hindu and Christian girls into love marriages, and compelling them to convert to Islam, adopt Islamic practices such as wearing hijab and burqa, forcing them to join Islamic religious schools, and to study Arabic and the Quran. When these conversions started developing into a well-structured pattern, alarm bells started ringing among different sections of the population. What worsened the situation was the media’s total silence on the issue, fearing loss of advertisement revenue, as the Muslim community in Kerala owns highly prosperous business establishments. Further, their Gulf connections have endowed them with formidable monetary muscle. A sizeable section of the media in Kerala, both vernacular and English, are recipients of generous advertisement revenue, and hence preferred to maintain a studied silence on this matter.
Politicians across the spectrum were also in strong denial mode, dismissing all talks of ‘love jihad’ as fabricated stories, communal propaganda and baseless rumours.
However, as early as July 2010, then Kerala Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan dropped a bombshell that the Popular Front of India (PFI) had plans to Islamize Kerala in 20 years using “money and marriages”. He further added that the PFI was actively engaged in activities to increase the Muslim population. One such strategy was to lure girls from Hindu and Christian communities into feigned love marriages, keep producing children year after year to augment the Muslim population in Kerala. This candid revelation by no less an authority than the Chief Minister emboldened the affected girls and private investigators to unravel the depth of the conspiracy and the ramifications of this modus operandi. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and different church denominations embarked on their independent investigations to assess the extent of damage. Their investigations and surveys brought to light the existence of an organized racket to trap young girls, seduce them using drugs, money, sex and blackmail, culminating in sham marriages, and trafficking to terror zones like Syria and Afghanistan for use as sex slaves. Many distraught parents, who out of shame and false notions of prestige, were maintaining tight secrecy, were emboldened to approach the judiciary. However, nothing substantial emerged.
Meanwhile, Kerala is undergoing a massive Arabization in cultural, educational and economic sectors. Arabic food joints sporting Arabic names, educational institutions with Arabic names, strict dress codes for women, multiplying number of mosques in every town, innumerable burqa shops springing up across the state, Muslim enclaves getting set up in almost all-important towns and cities are all raising deep suspicions about some sinister gameplan in operation to make the state a full-fledged Islamic State. Even in the 1970s and 1980s, Muslim women in Kerala never used the Arabic hijab and burqa, but presently even young girls in schools are coerced into wearing it. All this has created a fear complex in Hindu and Christian communities that a calculated and well-designed strategy of Islamisation has been set in motion.
Another trend started in 2023 is the renaming of many localities using Arabic names. In a controversial move by the Kozhikode Corporation in Kerala, the historic Tali Temple area is renamed as Markazudaawa on Google Maps, and the corporation has started the process of changing the names of the temple and surrounding areas. The Jubilee Hall, which is located in the temple area, has been renamed as Muhammad Abdurrahman Sahib Memorial Hall, and the adjacent park renamed as Naushad Park. This aggressive Arabization has stoked fears in the minds of Hindu and Christian communities that the state is headed the Kashmir way, and vote-crazy politicians of all political parties are actively conniving and abetting it.
In September 2021, Joseph Kallarangatt, Bishop of the Palai diocese of the Syro-Malabar Church, stirred a hornet’s nest by affirming the existence of ‘love jihad’ and ‘narcotics jihad’ in Kerala. The bishop unequivocally asserted that those who claim that “love jihad” doesn’t exist in Kerala are “blind to reality”. “Such people, be it politicians or those from social and cultural spaces or the media, may have their own vested interests. But one thing is clear. We are losing our young women. It’s not just love marriages. It’s a war strategy to destroy their lives.”
He also alluded to a former DGP’s statement that Kerala was becoming a recruitment centre for terrorists and that it was home to ‘sleeper cells’ for such persons. The bishop also emphasised: “For objectives such as exploitation, forced religious conversion, making financial gains and employing in terrorist activities, jihadis are trapping women of other faiths through love or other means. Young women are being trapped by feigning love, forcibly taken away without the consent of the parents and family members. They are often divorced after a few years of marriage. Such incidents are rising. Fathima, who got converted and went to Afghanistan, was a Hindu woman named Nimisha. Sonia Sebastian, a Christian, similarly became Ayesha. These are just a few examples. How Hindu and Christian women like them are ending up in terrorist camps is a serious subject to be studied.”
The bishop also pointed out that schools, colleges, hostels, training institutes and business establishments were being used by ‘jihadis’ to lay traps and lure young women. He also mentioned the existence of ‘narcotics jihad’, through which the lives of youngsters belonging to non-Muslim faiths were being destroyed by getting them addicted to the use and sale of drugs and narcotic substances.
Love jihad is a phenomenon occurring in other parts of the globe too. It is not an exclusive Kerala phenomenon. The Coptic Christians of Egypt are experiencing how hardline Islamists and radical Muslim organizations are paying young men to lure Christian girls away from their families. Kidnapping of Coptic girls is reported regularly. Egyptian conversion laws weigh heavily in favour of Islam.
The United Kingdom is also facing the problem. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of UK, in April 2023, tweeted: “I will do whatever it takes to root out evil grooming gangs who prey on vulnerable women and young girls. Firstly, I’m launching a group of specialist police officers who’ll go after grooming gangs across the country to bring them to justice.”
In July 2020, in a shocking interview with the Triggernometry, rape survivor Dr. Ella Hill revealed that “at least half a million Non-Muslim (kaffir) girls had been raped by grooming gangs, operated by Muslim men in the United Kingdom in the past 40 years”.
Recounting her tale of horror from 20 years ago, Hill said that she was targeted as a teenager by her Pakistani Muslim boyfriend. She said that the relationship soon turned into a “controlling, obsessive, and religiously charged” one. She reminisced about being taken to different flats around Rotherham, Sheffield and Bradford and subsequently raped, tortured, and strangled.
Similarly, in the UK, the Akal Takht, the highest temporal seat of Sikhism, has taken a serious view of reports of Sikh girls falling victim to ‘love jihad’ perpetrated by Pakistani youths to impress, marry and convert Sikh girls to Islam and use them in jihadi efforts.
As early as 2009, Portugal’s Cardinal Jose Policarpo had warned young women in the predominantly Catholic nation against marrying Muslims. “The advice that I give to young Portuguese girls is — be careful with relationships, think twice about marrying Muslims,” the patriarch of Lisbon said.
There are about 40,000 Muslims in Portugal, which, like neighbouring Spain, was once ruled by Muslims from North Africa, where many Muslim immigrants come from.
The Vatican discourages Catholic women from marrying Muslims and Policarpo echoed that position in blunt terms. The entire Europe is facing an identical problem, be it France, or Spain.
Germany has the additional problem of polygamy among Muslims. Justice Minister Heiko Maas has promised to clamp down on polygamy, preventing Muslims in Germany from maintaining multiple marriages. “No one who comes to us has the right to put their cultural roots, or their religious beliefs, above our laws,” Maas told to ‘Bild’ newspaper. “For that reason, multiple marriages cannot be recognized in Germany,” he added.
An August 2022 report of BBC states that thousands of Germans are fleeing to Paraguay to escape hostilities from Muslim migrants. An average of two women or girls are being gang-raped in Germany per day, with foreigners making up half of all perpetrators, according to the data released by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in Germany. In 2020, there were 704 instances of gang rape throughout the country, compared to 710 in 2019 and 649 in 2018. Afghani migrants were said to be particularly involved in the gang-rape statistics.
As early as 2015, Reuters had reported that approximately 550 young Muslim women had left Europe to join Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq, often marrying fighters. Many are well-educated, from middle-class families, born and raised in Europe.
The phenomenon of love jihad is thus not confined to India and Kerala alone. It is happening in many countries around the world. For this purpose, the temporary marriage, or Nikah Mut’ah, is being revived, which is an ancient Islamic practice that unites man and woman as husband and wife for a limited time. Historically, it was used so that a man could have a wife for a short while when travelling long distances. The Nikah Mut’ah consists of a verbal or written contract in which both parties agree to the length of time and conditions for the marriage. The union can last for a few hours, days, months or years and when the contract ends so does the marriage. Love jihad is just another form of Nikah Mut’ah. Unfortunately, girls who are enticed into this kind of marriages are not aware of the legal intricacies of the Islamic Law.
The Christian Association and Alliance for Social Action (CASA), a Kerala-based Christian body, is one of the many organizations that are at the forefront of exposing love jihad. Kevin Peter, President of CASA, opined during the 10th Ananthapuri Hindu Maha Sammelan in Thiruvananthapuram on April 29, 2022. “This is a silent war, part of the global agenda. In India, we call it love jihad, in England, they call it grooming gang. The lives of our girls have been destroyed without any security.”
“The aim of the Muslim community is to increase their population, thereby increase the number of MPs and MLAs and control the government,” he said.
The movement against ‘love jihad’ is universal and the Christian community is aggressively campaigning against this form of conversion and marriage, which are mostly temporary. On January 14, 2020, the Synod of Bishops of the Eastern-rite Syro-Malabar Church came out with a press statement on ‘love jihad’, which said Christian girls are lured through marriages to terrorism and its tragedies.
How can the issue be resolved amicably? All inter-religion marriages are performed under the Special Marriages Act, 1954. However, this Act just provides a legal framework for the marriage of people belonging to different religions. The problem encountered is that girls belonging to non-Islamic religions are being lured to convert and marry, and thereafter they are getting whisked away to distant foreign lands, especially terror zones, where they end up as sex slaves of foreign terrorists. How can this misuse of the Act be curbed?
Presently, data is being withheld, suppressed and kept secret by all stakeholders, including affected families. Government agencies are in the dark about the post-marriage movements of the couples. Hence, it should be made mandatory that for a period of five years from the date of marriage, the couple should be assigned to a marriage counsellor, who will conduct quarterly meetings to keep track of their welfare and submit a detailed report. These reports should be endorsed to the local jurisdictional Police Station and Intelligence Agencies, both Central and State, to effectively monitor any illegal developments. The government can also make it mandatory that the girl entering into a marriage under the Act need not change her maiden name for a period of five years and no religious conversion can be conducted. This would give a five-year post-marriage protection to the girl and deter persons who are hunting for soft targets from marriages of convenience. The government has an inescapable duty to protect every daughter of the nation from being misused, and being made pawns in a diabolical game of conversions and fodder for foreign terror predators.
Indian girls cannot be made ‘terror brides’.
The author is IRS (Rtd), Ph.D. (Narcotics), Former Director General, National Academy of Customs, Indirect Taxes & Narcotics (NACIN). Views expressed are personal.
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