#dnaEdit: A woman’s chakravyuh

The “love jihad” propaganda now lies in tatters with the centrepiece of the narrative that right-wing outfits constructed — the alleged victim in the “Meerut gangrape case”— recanting  her earlier statements. Two months after the woman alleged that she was abducted, gang-raped, and forced to convert to Islam, she reportedly approached a women’s police station and confessed that she had eloped with the Muslim man she later implicated, and had done so under pressure from her family. Earlier, she had also made sensational claims of being illegally confined at two madrassas where she was raped and that she saw other Hindu girls at the madrassa who were to be married to Sheikhs and taken to Dubai. Though none of this could be proven, the news media, by swallowing its incredulity and reporting the claims without the normative circumspection for a category of cases which have witnessed a pattern of misuse across the country, have unwittingly played into the hands of hate mongers.  In India’s warped and hyper-patriarchal social setup where women are denied the right to choose their partners, it is common for the relatives of minor girls and women who elope with their lovers to file bogus cases of kidnapping and rape against the boy and his family. 

But the discredited narrative she spun can no longer be considered as the “predilection” of a family desperately trying to salvage its “honour”. At a time when Hindu right-wing outfits were deftly raising the pitch with polarising statements, the incident was tailor-made to weave in the “love jihad” bogey and tar an entire community with a blatantly mischievous and dangerous conversion agenda. So far-reaching have been the political implications of this incident, that it also became the primary electoral slogan of India’s ruling national party, the BJP, in the recently concluded Uttar Pradesh assembly byelections. The party’s lead campaigner — Yogi Adityanath and other leaders including Sakshi Maharaj — incessantly raked up the Meerut incident in their speeches without waiting for the police investigation to culminate.  

It is important then to deconstruct the Meerut case to its bare fundamentals, because it tells us what is going wrong with the country, socially and politically. To begin with, two adults in love could not marry because their religions differed, and, more importantly, because the girl’s parents opposed. The woman is then allegedly forced to undergo an abortion and implicate the man, his family and community members on serious criminal charges. The issue takes a communal turn with the entry of religious and political groups. Before long, an attempt to spin the entire politics of a state around this issue is made. With no help forthcoming from family, society, police, politicians, judiciary or the media, the woman mustered the courage to reveal the immense pressure she was under. But the woman’s desperate attempt to take control of her life, by walking out of her home a second time, stands questioned yet again. Allegations are being levelled that she was coerced to change her statement by a Muslim friend of her lover with the complicity of the UP government. From communal polarisation, gender violence, denial of individual autonomy, pernicious politics to ineffectual watchdog agencies, the “Meerut gangrape case” saw the forces inimical to democratic and human rights having a field day. The huge individual, social and political stakes being paid for intensely personal choices like love, sexual intercourse, religion, and marriage run counter to the spirit of the Constitution.