“Saviour” appeals to Hindu men to rescue women from love jihad: The Hadiyas of Bengal-Part II

Aritra was 17 years old when she left for Mumbai with a Muslim boy she doesn’t want to name. She had lost her mother at a very young age, and her father had died a few months earlier that year when something changed her life forever.

They lived in Bautiya village of Nalhati block in West Bengal’s Birbhum district at that time. Without anyone to take care of the two minors — Aritra and her younger brother — after their father’s death, she lived in a hostel and her brother left for their uncles’ home in a nearby village. Before anyone in their family could figure out what was happening, she was in Mumbai with a young man.

“I was told that I had gone to Mumbai with a Muslim boy,” she says, sitting on a bed inside a dark room that has light seeping in through a single window. She speaks in a low voice, but that had nothing to do with the fact that her husband and mother-in-law are pottering around in the adjoining room. “They know everything,” she assures me. She is thin and pale, with a faint voice. She is now married to a “Hindu man”, lives in a joint family where the men are Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) activists.

Doesn’t Aritra remember how she went to Mumbai with the Muslim man? “No,” she is very clear about the fact that she has no recollection of that episode in her life. He was a neighbour in her village, 250 km from Kolkata. “I was told that I went with him to Mumbai. I faintly remember I stayed in a room, and then I was rescued by the police,” she says. She takes a deep breath and adds, “after I was rescued, I ran away again, I was told.”

***

I was taken to the home of Aritra and her husband, Pijush Kanti Mondol by VHP’s secretary, Birbhum district, Debojyoti Das. The village is approximately 15 km from Rampurhat. He was introducing me to yet another case of love jihad – a Hindu girl married to a Muslim boy whom the VHP had “rescued” with the help of the police. In the first part of this series, I had spoken with parents of the “rescued” girls. I was unable to talk to those girls because the men they had been married to, had no knowledge of the elopement.

However, in case of Aritra, her husband is aware of her past, and both of them were ready to talk about it (in presence of other family members) and gave me consent to photograph them.

“It’s a case of love jihad. The Muslim boy had targetted the girl’s property. She didn’t understand his tricks. They fled to Mumbai. Even after she was rescued, she fled again,” Das said. The girl’s uncles had approached Das, who then found a boy, Pijush Kanti Mondol, and arranged the marriage urgently. It is not clear whether Aritra had turned 18 years old around that time.

“Someone cast a spell on me, so I don’t remember anything from that time,” Aritra says. She tells me she was in class XI then – in 2016 – and her only regret now is that she could not clear her class XII board examinations because she had left for Mumbai.

Her arguments appear unclear. But it is certain that she wants to leave the past behind. She has been led to believe that the boy with whom she had left for Mumbai was going to harm her. Or perhaps she doesn’t quite believe them and pretends to forget the past. It is impossible to figure that out, except that her lapse of memory related only to the episode of her reported elopement, appears mysterious.

I talk to her husband, Pijush Kanti Mondol, about it. “I was asked by my parents if I wanted to marry this girl. I agreed,” Pijush says. The family owns agricultural land and he runs a small business of supplying cable television connection to homes in the village. “One must come forward to rescue girls trapped by love jihad,” Mondol says. Love jihad is an allegation against Muslim men that they ‘kidnap’ women from other communities, chiefly Hindus, for conversion to Islam, by feigning love.

“I cannot marry all women trapped by love jihad. One can marry only once. But I appeal to other Hindu men like me to save Hindu girls from love jihad. What I have done is a noble deed,” Pijush Kanti Mondol says. They got married last year and are expecting their first child.

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There are scores of “love jihad cases” in Birbhum’s Rampurhat, where the VHP is particularly active. Rampurhat, approximately 250 km from Kolkata, is an Assembly constituency in the Birbhum district of south Bengal. The elections have been consistently won by Trinamool Congress for the past several times and by the Forward Bloc before that. However, in recent times, the BJP and the VHP have been getting huge support from among people – evident from the Ram Navami rallies – which were said to have drawn 40,000 people this year.

With such impact, the VHP’s primary job here is to ensure Muslim men don’t get to marry Hindu girls. If a Hindu woman and a Muslim man elopes, they “rescue” these girls. Legally, it works when the girl is a minor, and they get police support. However, in a large number of cases, adult marriages between Hindu women and Muslim men have been broken too by families of the women and the VHP, who then quickly got the girls married to Hindu men. Such illegal and unethical practice has been going on for the past few years in several parts of West Bengal despite Trinamool Congress’ claim that the right-wing groups have no impact in the state. The ruling party prefers not to stir up the hornet’s nest for fear of losing the support it has in the area.

A Supreme Court Bench led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra had defined the limits of the court’s jurisdiction in the Hadiya case in February this year. Hadiya, a 26-year-old woman had converted to Islam and married a Muslim man. The marriage was annulled by the Kerala High Court and her father Asokan K.M. said she was being recruited to be trafficked to work in Syria as “sex slave”.

Justice D.Y. Chandrachud had observed: “Can a court say a marriage is not genuine or whether the relationship is not genuine? Can a court say she did not marry the right person? She came to us and told us that she married of her own accord.”

But for many women in West Bengal, societal and political pressure have been so perplexing they couldn’t be brave enough to protest the way Hadiya did.

 

Cover photo of Aritra and Pijush Kanti Mondol, by Swati Sengupta