Shraddha's murder and the pernicious bogey of 'love jihad'

While the horrific murder of 27-year-old Shraddha Walkar by her live-in partner, Aftab Poonawala, has shocked the country, and while the media serves up its grisly details 24x7 with an almost orgiastic intensity, a member of our political class, a class that never disappoints when it comes to the depths to which it can descend, has decided to use the crime to add ballast to his agenda of communal polarisation for electoral gains.

On November 19, while campaigning in Kutch for the forthcoming Gujarat Assembly elections, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma declared that if the country did not elect a strong leader like Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2024, a monster like Aftab, who hacked his partner's body into pieces and was also a perpetrator of 'love jihad', would rise up in every city of the country.

It seemed to have slipped Sarma's mind that the butchery of Shraddha by Aftab happened on Modiji's watch and that this straightaway demolishes his contention and punctures his vote-for-Modi war cry. But who cares about facts when the objective is to stir up fear and then fish in troubled waters? A bridge may collapse due to corruption, and criminal negligence and hundreds may die as a result, millions may be jobless and in economic distress, but the real issue, dear electorate, is that evil Muslim boys are preying upon Hindu girls with the intention of converting them to Islam, and then murdering them as well. (Er, not much point in converting a person if you're going to kill her off after that. Does nothing for the alleged plan to swell the Muslim population of this country.) And the only one who can protect you from this abomination, quoth Sarma, is Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Sarma is not the only one who has labelled this ghastly murder as an incident of so-called 'love jihad' — although he is the first major politician to cite the crime as a poll ploy to try and drive a fresh wedge between Hindus and Muslims. Indeed, ever since news broke that Shraddha's boyfriend Aftab had killed her in May and chopped up her body and disposed of her remains bit by bit, right-wing voices on social media have been shrill in their assertion that this was nothing but 'love jihad' on a diabolic scale. The fact that the victim was a Hindu girl and her murderer happened to be a Muslim with whom she was in a long-term relationship, was enough for them to pounce upon the case as validation for what is, in effect, a mythical theory confected by Hindutva wadis to make the Hindus seethe with a sort of tribal hatred against Muslims. After all, inter-faith relationships and inter-faith amity make it difficult to pursue the project of othering and demonising India's largest minority community.

Others have been citing Shraddha's chilling murder as proof that nothing good comes of a girl defying her parents and choosing to be in a live-in relationship. Union minister Kaushal Kishore went so far as to say that educated girls have only themselves to blame if such mishaps take place. "Get married first. Live-ins encourage crime," he said.

Victim blaming in cases of sexual assault or murder of women is nothing new, of course. But those who are holding up this murder as a cautionary tale and a prompt for girls and women to pack up their freedom to make life choices and crawl right back into the shadow of patriarchy, are either laughably naive or deliberately misleading. Intimate partner violence is a worldwide phenomenon, and its incidence or severity has no bearing on whether the partners are married or not — just as it has no bearing on whether the relationship is inter-faith. In India, the latest data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) show that of the 4,28,278 cases of crimes against women in 2021, as many as 1,36,192 cases were registered under the charge of 'cruelty by husband or his relatives'.

And let us not forget the dowry deaths, which, the sanskari, anti-live-in brigade may note, take place within the bonds of wedlock, and, more often than not, in marriages arranged and sanctioned by both sets of parents. According to the NCRB, there were 6589 dowry-related deaths in India in 2021. In other words, 18 women die every day due to torture, or murder, or abetment to suicide, over dowry.

As the police go about piecing together the evidence of Aftab's ghastly crime, and, hopefully, are able to press charges that will be enough to convict him, the public discourse should focus on how to enable girls and women to seek help when they are subjected to intimate partner violence. It should focus on creating the necessary conditions and support systems — both familial and institutional — and giving them the confidence and strength to walk out of abusive relationships before the assault gets out of hand and leads to what happened to Shraddha. Any other talk — whether of the purported sins of modernity or of so-called 'love jihad' — is just so much twaddle, and distracts attention from the legions of women who need help to be able to come out of the violent relationships in which they are trapped.

Unfortunately, there are enough people in this country who get incited and intimidated by references to the pernicious bogey of 'love jihad'. As the toxic cry resounded on social media after Shraddha's murder came to light, sections of the mainstream media too avidly joined in to fan the deplorable charge. Meanwhile, scant coverage was given to another grisly murder — a man named Abhijit Patidar slit his partner Shilpa's throat in Jabalpur and recorded her dying moments on video — perhaps because it didn't have the inflammatory (and fictive) love jihad angle that Shraddha's case was being made out to have?

There's more: One TV news anchor exhibited his journalistic credo by tweeting a picture of the invitation card of the marriage reception of a Hindu woman and a Muslim man in Vasai, Mumbai (the same area where Aftab and his family used to stay), with the hashtag LoveJihad. The reception ended up getting cancelled for the sake of "peace" in the locality.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has often reiterated his commitment to empower India's women. That includes protecting them from violence. Perhaps the next time he dwells on the subject of women's safety, he could also state that violence is simply that — a dark, destructive force that has no religion. Or is that too much to ask?

(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.