Legislation as Disinformation: The Love Jihad Conspiracy Theory in Law and Lived Experience
| Published date | 01 October 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231225424 |
| Author | Yash Sharma,Laura Dudley Jenkins |
| Date | 01 October 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: The Rule(s) of Law under HindutvaEdited by M. Sudhir Selvaraj, University of Bradford, UK and Raphael Susewind, London School of Economics, UKArticles |
Legislation as
Disinformation: The Love
Jihad Conspiracy Theory in
Law and Lived Experience
Yash Sharma and Laura Dudley Jenkins
University of Cincinnati, USA
Abstract
The “love jihad”conspiracy theory in India purports that Muslim men are deceptively
seducing or kidnapping non-Muslim women in large numbers to convert and marry
them. State laws in India have moved to control conversions—resulting in legislation
as disinformation—and sparked violent attacks against Muslims. We identify this as
the third wave of state-level anti-conversion laws in India and study how the conspiracy
theory is embedded into the text of the law and its relation to the current period of
Hindu nationalist ascendancy. Combining narrative analysis of the 2021 Gujarat amend-
ment and interrogating the everyday experiences of interfaith couples who face admin-
istrative, police, and vigilante violence we analyze the infrastructure and frameworks of
Hindu nationalist ideological dominance in India today. Our study questions the pre-
sumptions that underlie the characterization of India as a “democracy”considering
the current political, ideological, and legal configurations in the country under the BJP.
Keywords
South Asia, religion and politics, law and society, Hindutva and law
In India, the conspiracy theory of “love jihad”purports that Muslim men are deceptively
seducing or kidnapping non-Muslim women in large numbers to convert them to Islam,
marry them, and have Muslim children. Extreme versions of the conspiracy theory claim
that Muslim men have seduced and converted thousands of helpless women and girls,
Corresponding author:
Yash Sharma, University of Cincinnati, Crosley Tower 1101, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221, USA.
Email: sharmaym@mail.uc.edu
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2024, Vol. 33(5) 767–789
© The Author(s) 2024
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09646639231225424
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
with aid from Pakistan to pay for fashionable clothes and motorcycles to advance the
cause of Muslim population growth and domination. Building on prior laws limiting
so called “forcible”or “fraudulent”conversions, several state legislatures in India have
proposed or passed new laws to protect women from the supposed threat of love jihad
by restricting conversions in conjunction with marriages. These laws have resulted in har-
assment, detentions, and arrests of interfaith couples.
The idea of love jihad morphed from a fringe rumor to a conspiracy theory spread
through political networks and is now given credence through new laws against forced
or fraudulent conversion via marriage. Our central concern is the way conspiracy theories
can be given gravitas when ensconced in laws, which serve to perpetuate and further
spread these nefarious narratives. This pattern is not unique to Indian politics. In
several US states, legislators disseminating faux threats (from transgender students,
Critical Race Theory, or even Sharia) have proposed laws to protect women and children
from these supposed dangers. Our focus on legislation as disinformation thus sheds light
on a trend that extends beyond South Asia. Moreover, by examining how legislation itself
becomes a form of disinformation and how the administration and bureaucratic imple-
mentation of laws precipitate everyday violence, we respond to the call by Christophe
Jaffrelot and Gilles Vernier (2020) for a deeper analysis, beyond the party system, of
the ways democratic politics intertwine with the rule of law under Hindutva.
Hindutva refers to the dominant theoretical position within the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that understands India as
the historic and religious homeland of Hindus and discriminates against other religious
minorities like Muslims and Christians by labeling them as “outsiders”or “invaders.”
The BJP, along with the RSS, its parent organization, has spearheaded a systematic shift
in the political consensus of India by championing the normalization of a majoritarian
and exclusivist Hindutva agenda of religious nationalism. The 2019 general election
results in India cemented the BJP led by Narendra Modi, as the dominant political
force in the country with a second straight election victory. In 2014, BJP had
become the first party since 1984 to secure a majority in the parliament when it won
282 seats. The party substantially improved its performance in 2019 by securing 303
seats with a vote share of 37.4%.
Scholars argue that this new era of political consolidation has spelled the end of the “coali-
tion phase”(Yadav, 1999) in Indian politics that began in 1989 and signaled the return of a
one-party dominant system. The extant literature on the subject of Hindutva politics tends to
emphasize the value of macro-level explanations of “party systems”by stressing the role
played by institutions, elites, and political organizations. The 2019 elections, for example,
generated a debate on the need to contextualize the results within the literature on elections
and party systems in India (Kothari, 1964; Hinston & Vaishnav, 2020; Chibber & Verma,
2019). While this approach has its own merits, it represents an imbalanced account of demo-
cratic culture, political participation, and the processes of ideological control exerted by the
BJP since 2014 (see also IR “The rule of law in an ethnocracy”in this special issue on the
relevance of the project of Hindutva beyond electoral politics). It also tends to ignore the cul-
tural practices and social processes associated with how specific forms of political conduct
and behavior become entrenched at the local level. In criticizing the ubiquity of thisapproach,
768 Social & Legal Studies 33(5)
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