How a new law in India targets Muslim parents in the name of 'love jihad'
The proposed legislation by the state of Assam, where the right-wing BJP is in power, is yet another example of minority persecution by the proponents of the Hindutva ideology.
The government in the northeastern state of Assam in India has announced plans to enact legislation that analysts say targets the minority Muslim population.
Dubbed an anti-“love jihad” measure, the proposed law promises life imprisonment for coerced religious conversions through marriage and allows for the arrest of the accused man’s parents.
Analysts say the legislation is designed to vilify Muslim men as predators and fracture the fragile communal harmony in a state already scarred by ethnic strife.
The announcement, made on October 22, bundles the “love jihad” bill with others, targeting polygamy and land rights for tea tribes. But it is the former that has ignited outrage.
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who belongs to the right-wing BJP party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, declared the proposed legislation “historic,” while framing it as a shield for “social harmony”.
Yet, beneath the rhetoric lies a pattern of exclusionary politics, which paints Assam’s 34 percent Muslim population as an existential threat to the state's “indigenous” identity.
With provincial elections looming in 2026, analysts say the move will create further polarisation, diverting attention from pressing crises like annual floods that displace millions.
Aman Wadud, a spokesperson for the opposition Congress party in Assam, is highly critical of the move. “The entire thing is ambiguous. It’s a false Hindutva narrative,” he tells TRT World.
He points out that other Indian states that have enacted similar laws also failed to define the baffling term of “love jihad”.
Drawing from ordinances like Uttar Pradesh's 2020 Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion, which impose sentences of up to 10 years for similar offences, Wadud highlights the extremity of Assam’s proposal: life terms and parental arrests.
Standalone cases of coercion should be handled under existing laws, not through divisive laws enacted in the run-up to the election, he says.
Data from BJP-ruled states shows that the evidence of Muslim men marrying Hindu women in increasing numbers is shaky at best.
In Assam's mixed-faith districts, where Hindus, Muslims, and tribal groups have coexisted for generations, the bill risks entrenching suspicion and disharmony on the basis of faith.
“It is apparent that the target is one community,” Wadud says.
Old wine, new bottle
The “love jihad” trope alleging that Muslim men lure Hindu women for conversion to swell their numbers is no new invention.
Nadira Khatun, professor of communications at XIM University in Odisha, tells TRT World the proposed law is a “continuation of the earlier anti-religious conversion law” enacted in provinces like Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
“The entire discourse of love jihad resonates with right-wing propaganda: Muslims or ‘they’ are thought to outbreed ‘us’ Hindus,” she says.
By criminalising consensual relationships, the bill transforms private intimacies into “matters of state surveillance and punishment”, propagating a broader stigmatisation of Muslims as the “cultural other” in BJP strongholds, she says.
By Kazim Alam for TRTWORLD
