From: IOS World [mailto:press.iosworld@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2014 4:25 PM
To: ios1
Subject: IOS Current Affairs: There goes love jehad, out of the window
Short Takes
Uploaded on October 15, 2014
There goes love jehad, out of the window
Dr Mohammad Manzoor Alam
Love jehad is like a magical trick in the hands of the Sangh: now you see it , now you don't. This has been going on since 1920s, and it is as old as RSS.
Every few years this genie comes out of the Sangh bottle in some region of the country, only go back to the bottle in a few months. It has been playing havoc with public discourse and personal lives for a couple of months in BIMARU states. Its time for withdrawing into the bottle.
Its earlier outbreak occurred several years ago in South India. It went back into the bottle after its falsehood was repeatedly exposed by mixed-religion couples and feminists. Already it is showing signs of fatigue in the northern states. It got a severe setback when Sangh candidates got a nice drubbing in the recent elections.
Some people have seen it trying to sneak out through the window into the safety of the saffron-coloured bottle. Someone has already seen it flying out of his bedroom through the window. His wife practices a faith different from the one in which he was born, but does not practise.
The hype and hypocrisy of the media in this game has been noteworthy. Remember those big stories splashed across the front pages of "responsible" newspapers earlier this year about a Hindu woman in Meerut who eloped with her Muslim lover. The man gave her to a group of Muslim men, who allegedly raped her and forced her to convert to Islam (a novel way of conversion, of course).
Later it turned out that no such thing had happened to her and she was coerced by her parents to issue such a statement. Of course, Sangh groups were behind the parents.
Now that she has exposed the falsehood of the story no newspaper has put it on the front page, or anywhere else, except a couple of them, who have buried the two-inch, single-column news in the inner pages, at the least visible place in the newspaper.
The woman has complained to the Mahila Police that her parents are trying to murder her in an act of honour killing. Has anybody asked who are the people goading her parents to do away with her?
Now is the time for the love jehad genie to go back into its bottle quietly and unnoticed. Thank God.
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