Sure A Not

A controversial low-budget Indian feature film “The Kerala Story”, about a discredited anti-Muslim conspiracy theory, has been causing a political storm, going all the way to India’s Supreme Court.

The movie has helped circulate the idea of “love jihad,” a right-wing conspiracy theory that Muslim men are predators and out to marry and steal Hindu women. These ideas date back to the British colonial era and have far-reaching implications for people’s everyday lives.

The trailer claimed 32,000 Hindu girls had been converted to Islam by Muslim men with the intent of recruiting them to ISIS.

Once the film came out, citizens tried to get it banned by sending a petition to the India’s Supreme Court.

“Love jihad” is a conspiracy theory that claims Muslim men are converting Hindu and Christian women to Islam. Allegedly, the men feign love, get the women pregnant and eventually traffic them. The motive? To increase the Muslim population of India, perpetuate fanaticism and ultimately establish an Islamic state.

According to a recent Pew Report, shared-faith couples account for 99 per cent of married couples in India. Muslims account for approximately 14 per cent of India’s population.

There is no such thing as a “love jihad” and an investigation by India’s National Investigation Agency has said there is no evidence of “love jihad” taking place.

Political fallout

The figure of 32,000 women in the film’s trailer was immediately challenged by Indian political leaders and also debunked by fact-checkers from the website, Alt News.

The filmmakers agreed to change the number and a new trailer was released. It removed and replaced “32,000 girls” with “the true stories of three girls.”

And the movie went forward with its release, which according to some news reports, was successful at the box office.

Challenges in the Indian Supreme Court

Some politicians decried the propagandist nature of the movie and in West Bengal, it was banned by the government. Politicians there said the film “manipulated facts and contains hate speech in multiple scenes” and they banned the film to “avoid violence and hatred.”

The Indian Supreme Court lifted the state ban although it agreed that a disclaimer on the film was necessary. The disclaimer indicated that the film provides “no authentic data” to support the 32,000 figure and that it presents fictionalized accounts.

Other politicians, including some from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, promoted the film. Some of them even offered complimentary tickets or organized free screenings.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi endorsed the movie, assigning to it a distinct legitimacy.

Islamophobia from the 19th century

The idea of “love jihad” is both current and historical with notions coming from Indian and Hindu nationalism as well as 19th-century British colonial narratives. Both streams constructed Muslim men as hypersexual and hyperaggressive.

In the 19th century, Hindu scholars and new religious organisations (like Arya Samaj and Hindu Mahasabha) began producing a new Hindu-centric version of Indian history. This history grew in response to British colonialism but at the same time, shared similarities with British colonial ideas.

The British portrayed themselves as just rulers, partly by contrasting themselves with their casting of Muslim kings as hypersexual fanatics.

They pointed to a medieval darkness marked by the lust and tyranny of Muslim rulers. Mughal rulers were portrayed as rapists attacking both Hindu women and “Mother India.” This portrayal included the Muslim Prophet Muhammad who was portrayed in some places as sexually perverse.

These ideas became part of the curriculum in certain Indian states and elite Hindu scholars, educated at colonial schools, perpetuated these narratives in their writing. And the idea of a type of “love jihad” became part of the discourse created through pamphlets, novels, newspapers and magazines — especially in North India.

By the late 19th century, India was constructed around Hindu heterosexual relationships and family values in opposition to purported Muslim sexual deviance and rampant sexuality.

In 1923, Madan Mohan Malaviya, the president of the Hindu Mahasabha, said in a speech, “hardly any day passes without our noticing a case or two of kidnapping of Hindu women and children by not only Muslim badmashes (rogues) and goondas (hooligans), but also men of standing and means.”

Challenges to interfaith marriage

Today, it’s not just The Kerala Story that has circulated the “love jihad” myth. Reportage in Hindu nationalist media continues to make headlines.

Organizer, a magazine run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a network of Hindu nationalist organizations, recently claimed that three cases of love jihad following the same pattern as those in ‘The Kerala Story’ were reported in a month.

Love jihad’s centrality to Hindu nationalist politics has led to specifically stringent laws focused heavily on sexuality and marriage.

Hindu vigilantes, in partnership with the police, launch missions to separate interfaith couples. Muslim men have been brutalized, killed, forced into hiding and incarcerated using historic anti-conversion laws.

One response to the chatter about “love jihad,” is an Instagram channel called India Love Project launched to celebrate stories of interfaith love and marriages.

Hopefully, such efforts continue to address Islamophobia and broaden to include a larger public discourse looking at transnational Islamophobic interlinkages, both past and present.

Wajiha Mehdi is a PhD Candidate at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, University of British Columbia.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The main purpose of  last month’s visit to China by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was, in his words, to re-establish communications to reduce “ misunderstandings and miscommunications” so as to prevent or manage incidents between the two militaries. But he was unsuccessful. It seems that the very agreement to talk has become politicized and that the communications process is being “used” to the advantage of one or the other.   

The level of US-China military communications is at a historic nadir and incidents between their militaries are increasing in frequency and intensity. As incidents proliferate, a cacophony of policymakers and analysts – including myself – is calling for better communication to avoid or manage them before they get out of control. 

Tension remains high. On June 3, a collision between US and Chinese warships was narrowly avoided when a Chinese vessel abruptly cut across the bow of the US ship in the Taiwan Strait. This incident came hot on the heels of a May 31 incident that Washington called an unsafe and unprofessional intercept of a US intelligence-collection plane over the South China Sea.

Both blamed each other for the near catastrophes. According to the US, these incidents were part of a pattern of more aggressive and belligerent risk-taking.  

The US wants to re-establish communications to buy time and tamp down the possibilities of conflict. But China is not “cooperating.” As Sun Yun, senior fellow and co-director of the East Asia Program and director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, points out, their positions on restarting military dialogue may be part of a strategy that encompasses the communication process.

At the very least it seems to have been captured by their fundamental differences. Some even say China is not interested in improving military-to-military communications and believes actions on both sides speak for themselves.

As Sun points out, with the US overreach in the Ukraine war and hotspots around the globe, China may think that Washington is more averse to conflict than it is. That means China thinks it has more diplomatic space to maneuver.

Suspicion on both sides

China may also think that agreeing to communicate will undermine its tactic of brinkmanship. Moreover, it may want to keep the US guessing and cautious as to its intent and red lines whose crossing may trigger military conflict.

China may also think that the process of military communication favors the US because it can point to it as its good-faith effort and have more freedom of action while negotiations continue.

At the extreme, China may even believe that a crisis would provide an opportunity to extract concessions from the US and to negotiate in earnest a regime of peaceful co-existence.  

So China may want to slow-play military-to-military communications. If this is so, US personal sanctions on Defense Minister Li Shangfu provide it an opportunity to refuse dialogue and blame it on a petty ad hominen.

Realpolitik is influencing the talks.  China is demanding that the US demonstrate good faith by actions, not words. It seems that every opportunity for meaningful talks is preceded, followed  or even accompanied by aggressive or negative actions on both sides.

The close-in intelligence-gathering and freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) continue unabated. The US mouths the “one-China policy” yet it sends ever more arms and high-level politicians to Taiwan. 

We only know of major incidents. It seems that there are more that go unreported. China wants the US to dial back its daily close-in intelligence-gathering focused on its defenses as well as its provocative and redundant FONOPs targeting China’s maritime claims. The US thinks that to do to so unilaterally could be a sign of weakness. 

‘One China,’ sort of

Most important, China wants the US to tamp down its political and military support for Taiwan. Beijing believes Washington is bit by bit undermining the Shanghai Communiqué in which the US acknowledged there is only one China. It is difficult to envisage productive dialogue until these conditions are met. Otherwise mutual suspicion will prevail.

Even with better military-to-military communications, the trust gap is unlikely to improve and dangerous incidents are still likely. This is because they do not stem from misunderstandings and miscommunications but are rooted in deeper differences regarding the “international order” and strategic interests. So the best outcome of talks would be to set up a system to manage these incidents when they occur.

The two countries have stated their fundamental policies regarding their relationship. Chinese President Xi Jinping proffered “three nos.” China “does not seek to change the existing international order, does not interfere in the United States’ internal affairs and has no intention of displacing the United States.”

US President Joe Biden has stated “five nos.”

“The United States does not seek a new cold war. It does not seek conflict with China to change China’s system. The revitalization of its alliances is not directed at China and does not support Taiwanese independence.”

But their actions do not seem to match their words.

Xi has proposed “a new model of great-power relations” that implies equality and shared responsibility in world affairs. But so far the US has in essence rejected it, apparently because it believes that it is the world’s only “exceptional” nation. Expecting that to change soon is unrealistic.

This communications conundrum is a corollary to the concept of mutual transparency in military affairs. While military “transparency” may sound neutral and reasonable, it favors the more powerful. The more powerful country can intimidate the other by revealing its capabilities while the inferior military power displays its weaknesses that can be exploited by the more powerful side.

Besides, “transparency” is ambiguous. The US claims to be transparent, but try to ask questions about the position and role of its nuclear-armed submarines, or its specific intelligence collection capabilities in the South China Sea.

Until the “nos” on either side begin to ring true, there will be little progress on meaningful military-to-military communications, and tension will remain high in the South China Sea.

An edited version of this piece appeared in the South China Morning Post.

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