A Plot and the Pattern

 

Most of us have read with a touch of impersonal distaste about various forms of ‘jihad’ – evil concepts filtering in from West Asian deserts into our psyche with regular frequency. The impersonality remains as long as it is happening elsewhere to someone unknown to us. However, while we guard our societal frontiers with much zealousness, little do we realise that evil usually creeps in unannounced through our back-doors. So to my utter shock and disgust I walked into a story of how love jihad had sent its feelers to a young underage cousin and her school friends in my hometown making me realise it was not a ‘Hindutva conspiracy’ as many like to believe but has spread its sinister tentacles into a society caught napping.

 

The modus-operandi is simple and the usual route is through in-your face social media, usually through an innocuous FB friendship requests and an ever expanding circle of friendships on social media ‘quintessential, innocent friendships are the facades’. Elders flip through the pictures of these young school and college going youngsters of the family and their gregarious friends ignoring their posts. However, given the increasing number of such incidents, it is high time we brought in measures of discernment and vigilance and started asking some basic questions to know more about these smiling friends encircling our young boys and girls. Love jihad is real and is in our own backyards now, slowly unravelling the moral fabric upon which our society is built. The intent is to target and lure vulnerable young females of other communities by pretending to be in love, to convert them into their own religion with by-product of numerous children who can be abandoned for a whim and claiming other benefits like going back to the girls’ family and demanding monetary support, staking rights to property, etc.

 

This sordid story I stumbled upon goes like this: One late night in June 2016, in a Kannur town, neighbors spotted torch lights coming from upstairs of a Hindu house while family is away. Assuming burglars at work, they surround the house and ring the bell. One of the neighbor climbed up onto the first floor and spotted the young school-going girl of the house with a bearded boy in the upstairs bedroom. They are forced to come out and questioned by the furious neighbours. It turns out the bearded boy belonging to the Muslim community is an engineering student and has travelled all the way from Malappuram district to spend time with the girl, he has done so a few times before. The girl stayed back on the pretext of staying over with friends next door while preparing for tenth exams. Some quick vigilante justice was served to the boy by the furious neighbours before the local police arrived and took the boy for questioning. The boy had a laptop with names of several local Hindu minor girls and their profiles on his FB page. Many questions remained unanswered, clearly a lackadaisical attitude and negligence on guardians’ part, not verifying with neighbours on the stayover plan, etc.

 

 

However, the key point that emerged was the boy had connected with the minors through FB and had also met several of her local friends through her during his visits. He had even taken some of them out for one-day picnics to local tourist spots while the parents thought the girls were at school. If this were an ‘ordinary youngster out to have a good time’ kind of story it would not get our napes tingling however the twist here is the boy on police interrogation revealed to have links with the dreaded terror outfit ISS. He admitted he was out on intentional recce to feel out vulnerable youngsters of the area. In a state where several youngsters have gone missing and thought to have joined outlawed terror outfits this should have set large bells ringing for the state officials and security machinery. Fortunately this particular misadventure was caught and curtailed before serious harm could be done though the name of these girls were shared with his ISS contacts. The school girls too faced some sustained police questioning and were let off after some warnings. The media hardly picked on this story and like so many similar stories this one too seems to have died quietly after the boy spent a few months in jail.

 

While there are numerous harrowing tales of girls lured by Muslim youths in the name of ‘love’ into sordid lives and terrible tragedies, it doesn’t hit the senses till it hits homes. All the guardians were aware of creeping love jihad in the state and across the nation and yet chose to be blind to the coming and going of this bearded youth in their locality.

 

The girls belonged to families that go to temples regularly and light ‘deepams’ morning and evening as is the typical Hindu ritual in the state. Yet they had no compunction accepting an older Muslim boy among the folds of their daughters indicating a kind of blind acceptance which would be unheard of in earlier times especially as Muslims and Hindus live shoulder to shoulder in Kerala anyway.

 

The girls at a highly impressionable age spoke highly of being treated like queens by this guy, with much respect and lavish treats, ice-creams and memorabilia being given to them.

 

In this case the intention of the boy was to collect names of as many vulnerable starry-eyed youngster as possible. Little do they know about what happens once they fall in and comply withthe demands of elopement and sexual relation? Most have heard about cases of 16-year-old Amrita dating a Muhammad Irshad, later found dead near railway track at Mukkali, Kerala. Or about 23-year-old Anuja who had eloped with a much elder Khaleem, father of three and later was found hanging with head tonsured in May 2015 and many such cases across India. Our girls have no idea about the differences in the social customs and treatment of women in Muslim households in the adjoining the compound wall. Muslim men are given a superior decision making status over-riding good sense of the collective household including elders. They are brought up with the concept of multiple wives which is legally unknown to a Hindu household. Muslim women are usually treated as subservient and many rights and privileges available to a Hindu woman is denied to her.