Love Jihad in India: Hindu and Christian girls converted to Islam, taken to join ISIS, now want to return

Ayesha & Fathima

Jihad Watch : 2016: A Christian girl, Sonia Sebastian, married Abdul Rashid Abdulla, and converted to Islam. She was now Ayesha. And Nimisha, dentist by profession, married a Christian man named Bexon, and both converted to Islam. Nimisha was now Fathima. Both women hailing from Kerala, India, accompanied their Muslim husbands to Afghanistan and were inducted into the globally recognized terrorist organization, the Islamic State (ISIS).

Now, with their husbands dead, they have sent out videos requesting to return to India. They also demand absolute immunity against any arrest. “I came to Khorasan in 2016. Once we reached here, many things we saw were not up to our expectations. We expected to live an Islamic life, under an Islamic law. That is not what the reality is. Now, I want to return to India, to my husband’s family,” says Sonia in the video.

A British citizen of Indian origin and Hindu faith, Siddhartha Dhar, converted to Islam to marry a Muslim woman, Aisha. He then proceeded to become a champion of Sharia law in the UK and is now a US-designated terrorist known by the name of Abu Rumaysah al-Britani. While the western reader stays uninitiated, thousands of girls are entrapped in “Love Jihad”. One popular definition of this phenomenon: “Love Jihad is an alleged activity wherein Muslim youth utilize such emotional appeals, using charm to entice girls into conversion by feigning love – in some reports, as an organized, funded behavior.”

Numerous such cases are found across Kerala, where the fact that the intent behind the “love” is “jihad” is screamingly evident. But the mainstream media and the judiciary are reluctant to acknowledge this as a common practice, or to assign a criminal penalty to it. One may argue, “A Muslim man can fall in love with a non-Muslim girl, why must one deride it as ‘Jihad’?” We ask, why would any one indoctrinate his beloved to convert to Islam, should the love be genuine? Given the vastly heterogeneous demography,

interfaith marriages are not rare in India. But religious conversions are vigorously advocated for by Muslim partners. Even the “celebrity world” is not free from this dogmatic practice. When the iconic Indian singer Kishore Kumar married the magnificent actress Madhubala, he converted from Hinduism to Islam and assumed the name Karim Abdul. The custom of “conversion for love” is more commonplace, and is expected when the man is a Muslim, and woman is not. Introducing the partner to the fold of Islam, initially, implied a demographic shift, as the society now had one more Muslim and one less Hindu/Christian/what have you, and it goes without saying that the progeny from the marriage would be brought up as Muslim.

But this arrangement has now taken the shape of a trap meant to perpetuate terrorism by drawing in non-Muslim women. India’s federal anti-terrorism agency, the National Investigation Agency, has informed a court that it was scrutinizing 90 cases of Hindu women who allegedly were lured or forced to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men in the last two years. While Hindu women have always been easy prey for Islamists, Christians girls are not far from their radar either. In a public statement made in January 2020, Syro-Malabar Media Commission secretary Fr. Antony Thalachelloor stated, “Many are even scared to use the term ‘Love Jihad,’ but the Synod has now come out and said the exact words.

There are reports of Christian girls getting converted and taken abroad. They are not living an ideal pious life, either. They are made to live with more than one person and some are even pushed into becoming sex slaves.” The practice and execution of Love Jihad is not limited anymore to wooing non-Muslim girls into marriages and conversions, followed by a life amidst terrorists. Initiating courtship with non-Muslim women, often by feigning non-Muslim identities, has become a popular trick of Islamists these days. Women ensnared into such romantic alliances often find themselves caught in a quagmire that end in rape and murder.

West Bengal, an Indian state that shares a 2,582-mile border with Islamic Bangladesh, is plagued with such crimes. The state already has a sizable Muslim population, and breaching the India-Bangladesh border is a cakewalk for Bangladeshi intruders, given the local government’s pro-Islamic and pro-Bangladesh approach; this adds to the lawlessness. Atrocities against women are on a constant upsurge in the state, and came to the fore after the controversial and shocking nun rape case of 2015, in which a septuagenarian Catholic nun was gang-raped by Bangladeshi infiltrators.

Liberals tried their best to pin the crime on Hindus, to buttress the narrative of “Hindus hate Christians”. In January this year, days after she broke up with her Muslim boyfriend, the charred and half-eaten body of a 17-year-old Hindu girl was recovered from South Dinajpur district of West Bengal. Mohabur Rahman, the former lover, was taken in custody for slitting the teenager’s throat and setting her ablaze while she was still alive. This very inhuman way of murder was repeated on a Hindu mother-daughter duo by the daughter’s Muslim lover, Sheikh Saddam Hussein, along with his accomplice, Sheikh Manjur.

Twin dead-bodies were recovered from an isolated area in Haldia, West Bengal, in February 2020. Mohammed Mohiuddin, a native of West Bengal, was arrested in the state of Uttar Pradesh for forging identity as a Hindu man and marrying a Hindu girl. These are just a handful of the plethora of such heinous cases.

The country is replete with such incidents, and the vile motive behind these “effected affections” and marriages speak for themselves. Despite the multiplicity of blood-curdling cases of forgery, forced conversions, murders and rapes, the liberal ecosystem, commanding a strong influence on the judiciary, refuses to attest that “Love Jihad” is a persisting social threat swallowing vulnerable young girls every day.

We fear that this may be the next global pandemic, after we find a cure for the coronavirus.