The second woman, Tunisha Sharma, a 20-year-old actor, allegedly hung herself on December 24 on the set of a TV show that she was working on with her boyfriend. They had apparently broken up shortly before her death. After Sharma’s death, her boyfriend was arrested for “abetment to suicide.”

What links the otherwise unconnected deaths of these two young women is that they were Hindu and their boyfriends were Muslim. Predictably, both cases were reported in the mainstream Indian media, particularly on television, as examples of “love jihad” — a right-wing conspiracy theory alleging that vulnerable Hindu women are being groomed by Muslim men and converted to Islam.   

Asif Khan, a resident of Dindori, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, married Sakshi Sahu in April. They were in their early 20s. As the news spread through their village of a Muslim man marrying a Hindu woman, local Hindutva (or Hindu nationalist) groups mobilized to “rescue” Sakshi.

The law was on the side of the vigilantes. The police booked Asif for wrongful confinement and kidnapping, based on a complaint by Sakshi’s brother. A local BJP unit blocked a nearby highway to protest the marriage and the district administration demolished Asif’s family home and three shops they owned.

Still, the couple refused to break up, leaving their village to live a quieter married life elsewhere. But news of Walkar’s murder, and the associated national talk of love jihad, reintroduced stresses and fears into their marriage. “We have been reassuring Sakshi that she doesn’t need to be afraid,” Asif’s father, Halim Khan, told me. “But she is scared.” Asif told me that he had told Sakshi “society would never accept [their] relationship” but that she had said she would “throw herself in front of a train” if they broke up because of their religion.

But the anger evident in the media coverage of Walkar’s death shook the couple. Asif told Sakshi that “she is not a captive, that she can go back to her parents if she wants.” 

According to Charu Gupta, a history professor at Delhi University, love jihad “produces a master narrative of Muslim male aggression and Hindu woman’s seizure.” This, she wrote, is “critically linked to the fictive demographic fear of Hindus being outnumbered by others, which is central to Hindutva politics,” and makes it possible for a still overwhelming majority that controls all the levers of power to “portray itself as an ‘endangered’ minority.”

Several politicians, particularly from the BJP, the party that controls India’s federal government, have referred to the deaths of Walkar and Sharma in terms of love jihad. In Karnataka — the Indian state that contains Bengaluru, a city that is, by some estimates, second only to Silicon Valley as a global hub for tech — a BJP member of parliament began the new year by telling party workers that, when campaigning for local elections scheduled in the spring, they should not “speak about minor issues like roads and sewage.” Instead, they should impress on voters that “if you are worried about your children’s future and if you want to stop love jihad, then we need BJP… To get rid of love jihad, we need BJP.”

Just last month, Karnataka’s home minister told reporters that he had received a petition from Hindutva groups demanding that a special task force be formed to investigate love jihad. He added that in his view, the state’s anti-conversion laws were sufficient to deter and deal with cases of love jihad. Karnataka, governed by the BJP, has so far resisted joining other BJP-governed states, such as Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, in specifically legislating to make interfaith marriage more difficult. 

In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with over 200 million people, the chief minister, a Hindu monk notorious for hate speech, told a crowd in a campaign speech that he would “protect the honor and dignity of women” from love jihad “at any cost.” In February 2021, Uttar Pradesh introduced a law that criminalized religious conversion “through marriage, deceit, coercion, or enticement.” Those found guilty can be imprisoned for up to a decade.

And in Madhya Pradesh, which sprawls across the center of India, the chief minister referred to Walkar’s murder in December, at an event to celebrate a local 19th-century freedom fighter. The hero was a tribal, a term used in India to refer to ethnic minorities, officially designated in the Indian constitution as Scheduled Tribes, who remain some of the most economically underprivileged people in the country. “I will not allow this game of love jihad to continue,” the chief minister said. “Someone cheats our daughters in the name of love, marries them, and cuts them into 35 pieces. Such acts will not be allowed in Madhya Pradesh.” This, even though Walkar was not murdered in the state and was not a tribal.  

Statements such as these, made by powerful politicians, have put even more pressure on the few people brave enough to enter into interfaith marriages in India. Even before the right-wing, Hindu supremacist bogeyman of love jihad became widespread, interfaith relationships in India were rare. Now they are dangerous. 

Just over 2% of marriages in India are interfaith. A Pew Research Center report in 2021 indicated that 99% of Hindus in India said they were married to someone from their own religious background, as did 98% of Muslims, 97% of Sikhs and Buddhists and 95% of Christians. These statistics underscore the ideological impetus behind the legislation in BJP-ruled states that seek to tackle religious conversion, and specifically love jihad, when the phenomenon clearly appears to be a figment of the imagination.

In Uttar Pradesh, where you can be imprisoned if the authorities deem your marriage to be one in which the primary motivation was religious conversion, Rashid Khan, a Muslim man, married Pinki, a Hindu woman. They married in 2020, the year that the state’s draconian anti-conversion law was formulated though not yet passed. Pinki told me she knew their future was fraught with danger but she went ahead and asked for Rashid’s phone number anyway. 

Both Pinki and Rashid worked in Dehradun, a city nestled in the picturesque foothills of the Himalayas, and they grew close over long conversations and stolen moments between shifts. Three years later, Rashid said he wanted to marry her, and he was willing to marry her according to Hindu custom and ritual. Pinki said she had long been drawn to Islam and wanted to have a Muslim wedding and to convert. On July 24, their marriage was solemnized in a nikah in a Dehradun mosque. Pinki changed her name to Muskan.

Initially, Muskan tried to get her family to accept their marriage, but her mother beat her and threw her out of the house. Still, the early months of their marriage were happy and soon Muskan was pregnant with their first child.

When the couple decided to get their marriage officially recorded in a court in Moradabad, in Uttar Pradesh, where Rashid was from, their petition was noticed by a local unit of the Bajrang Dal — a group of Hindutva militants which is part of the broader Sangh Parivar, the Hindutva “family” that includes the BJP. The couple suspects that their lawyer tipped off the Bajrang Dal. Rashid and Muskan were attacked on their way to the courthouse.

The mob beat up Rashid and his brother and took them to the police station. Meanwhile, Muskan, who was in the fourth month of her first pregnancy, was severely beaten and dumped outside a government-run shelter for women and children. “I was in trauma and extreme pain. I thought I would never see Rashid again,” Muskan told me, adding that there were other women  who were romantically involved with Muslim men being held at the shelter. “We were all tortured,” she alleged. “Made to work, cooking and cleaning continuously. I spent the days crying and in pain.” 

Muskan was eventually moved to a hospital, where she says she was injected by a doctor with undisclosed medicines. Shortly after, she suffered a miscarriage and was discharged the next day.

When Rashid was brought to court, Muskan said she loved him and that she had married him of her own free will. Her testimony convinced the court to release Rashid. The couple moved back to Dehradun to restart their lives in a single room. “This is the safest place we could find,” she told me. They have had a child since the miscarriage, and Muskan is breastfeeding her on the double bed that takes up most of the space in the room. Rashid, and his sister with her husband and son, were also sitting on the same bed. In another corner, a gas stove perched on a table served as the kitchen.

Since Narendra Modi swept into office in 2014 and was reelected with an even stronger mandate in 2019, almost every Muslim action is freighted with the word “jihad.” The mainstream Indian media have used this shorthand with relish. On March 11, 2020, Sudhir Chaudhary, a prominent and popular Indian journalist, presented his viewers with a chart outlining the various kinds of jihad to which India’s Hindus were subject. He talked about “hard” jihad and “soft” jihad, about the jihad being waged by the media, about the jihad being waged on history, on land rights, on the Indian economy, on affairs of the heart. The media even attempted to pin the spread of Covid in India to a single superspreader event connected to an Islamic conclave in a Delhi neighborhood, labeling it “corona jihad.” 

Another prominent Indian television journalist described an attempt by Muslims to “infiltrate” the civil services by passing a nationwide exam as the “UPSC jihad.” Muslims are drastically underrepresented in India’s civil services, and the number is dwindling, with only 3% qualifying to join the services in 2021, even though Muslims make up an estimated 14% of the population. Meanwhile, the 2021 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report shows that Muslims comprise more than 30% of India’s prison population.

Last year, Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, said during a U.S congressional briefing that Modi was an “extremist who has taken over the government.” Stanton, a credible and highly respected scholar, said: “We are warning that genocide could very well happen in India.”

Aasif Mujtaba, the founder of a nonprofit organization, Miles2Smile, told me that Muslims had already been effectively demeaned in India and were now being openly persecuted. He said that the word “jihad” had been weaponized, that it had been used to create an “us versus them narrative, in which the ‘them’ are Muslims who are considered to be lesser humans.” They are trying, now, Mujtaba added, to “delegitimize Muslims as citizens of the land.”

He is, in part, referring to the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act which led to weeks of protests until Covid-related lockdowns forced protesters off the street. The United Nations described the act — which offers a path to citizenship to everyone except Muslims who fled to India from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh before 2014 because they were persecuted for their religious beliefs — as “fundamentally discriminatory in nature.” But Mujtaba is also referring to a general atmosphere in which drastic, even illegal measures can be taken to punish Muslims for alleged crimes, including bulldozing their homes, breaking up their relationships and boycotting or shutting down their businesses. In October, Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The authorities in several Indian states are carrying out violence against Muslims as a kind of summary punishment… [they] are sending a message to the public that Muslims can be discriminated against and attacked.”

But Muskan, who told a court in Uttar Pradesh of her love for Rashid, remains defiant. “Even though they say that Muslim men manipulate Hindu girls,” she told me, “it was me who initiated our relationship. I made a choice. They might call it jihad but people like us won’t stop loving each other.”

The post When India’s right wing comes for interfaith marriage appeared first on Coda Story.

The photo has already become an iconic representation of the devastation suffered by Ukrainians in the war. But years from now, what will it mean for this young woman and her child? Images of adults and children severely impacted by violence endure in public and personal memory — forever stored on the internet and making a comeback every now and then. 

Thousands of miles away, in Kashmir — home to one of the world’s longest-running conflicts — the long-term effects of an image like this can be extreme for a private individual. The consequences can be life-changing.

Consider the ordeal of Farooq Dar. In 2017, after casting his ballot in a contentious election that had led to a spike in public violence, Indian army officers famously apprehended the 33-year-old Kashmiri man, beat him and then tied Dar to the front of a jeep. They drove for 17 miles with Dar strapped to the vehicle’s spare tire, effectively using him as a human shield in a conflict zone, where the army was vulnerable to attack. 

When the vehicle came to a halt, army officers themselves snapped Dar’s picture, even as he begged to not be photographed. “In those moments, I felt like I should have never existed. My lips were bleeding and they had broken my elbow,” Dar recalled. Photos of the scene instantly went viral on social media.

The images provoked massive outrage, but the Indian army defended its actions, as did the government. Supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party sold T-shirts featuring images of the incident, bearing the caption: “Indian Army saving your a**, whether you like it or not!” The incident was even recreated in a Bollywood movie.

“They were making money out of my tragedy. Indians used me terribly,” Dar told me in a recent interview.

“When they clicked my picture and uploaded it on the internet, they showed the world how brave they were without thinking about how it would ruin my life.”

Kashmir’s long-standing political conflict

The conflict in the Kashmir Valley began in 1947 with the fall of the colonial British Empire and the subsequent emergence of a relatively secular India, and Pakistan, a homeland sought by Muslims who feared a Hindu majoritarian assault. Territories like Kashmir were given the option, at least on paper, to accede to either dominion. Kashmir fell into a quagmire: it was, and still is, predominantly Muslim but was ruled by a Hindu autocrat who conditionally acceded to the Indian Union on the promise, made by India’s first prime minister, of a plebiscite in which residents of the region would decide which country they wanted to belong to. But the plebiscite never took place.

Kashmiris have lived through generations of political conflict and uncertainty ever since, with many continuing to demand their right to self-determination from an indifferent New Delhi. Their defiance has been met with the pervasive presence of the Indian army; sweeping curfews and communication shutdowns; economic isolation; extrajudicial killings and torture; and a long list of other human rights violations.

‘I cannot hide’

At first, Dar had no idea that photos of the incident had gone viral. The internet was shut down in Kashmir, as is often the case. When the connection came back, Dar discovered that he had become known as “the human shield” — a title he is still unable to escape, five years on.

People recognized him everywhere. He was suddenly unable to find a job, or even a woman to marry.

All potential matches were unnerved by what had happened to him. Eventually, a year later, Dar married a woman from the Jammu division of Jammu and Kashmir state, who had no knowledge of what had happened to him. He keeps the story from her, even now.

Dar has attempted suicide. He has thought of running away from Kashmir and starting anew, but he fears this would not be enough.

“I cannot hide. That is what the internet does to you. One share and the world knows you,” he said.

“[For as long as] the internet exists, this picture will exist. They almost killed me that day but I survived,” said Dar.

Haunted from an early age

Dar is not entirely alone. Faizan Sofi has endured a similar trauma for a decade. When he was just 12 years old, Sofi was arrested on rioting allegations, after a picture of him throwing stones appeared online.

“I was too young. It was a mistake that we promised would never be repeated,” he said.

A few days after his arrest, while Sofi was being transferred from the court to a juvenile facility, he and his younger sister sobbed as she clung to his arm. A journalist captured the moment, and soon the photograph went viral online. Although it created a wave of sympathy for the children and intense criticism of the government at the time, the photo haunted Sofi into adulthood.

In 10 years since the incident, Sofi has been arrested five more times. After the police arrested him on campus, he dropped out of school. Friends deserted him. Like Dar, he has been unable to find work. He still grapples with depression and sleeplessness.

“Over the years, I have been shown my photo so many times. And even though I know that I did not do anything wrong, it hurts,” he said.

One of the youngest people known to be facing this challenge is a five-year-old Kashmiri boy, who was famously photographed two years ago, sitting atop the body of his grandfather, who was slain in the crossfire of a gun battle that broke out in the northern city of Sopore. The boy’s family members now try to restrict his internet access, in order to prevent him from finding his own image there. They told me they wish that whomever took the photograph had blurred the boy’s face before sharing it with the world.

“We are sure that if he sees his picture someday, it will all come back to him because he has mild memories of the day that he is not able to comprehend,” said the boy’s uncle. 

Who has the right to be forgotten?

This is not a new phenomenon — photos like Nick Ut’s 1973 “The Terror of War” (also known as “Napalm Girl”) that showed a naked girl, screaming and running from a napalm attack in South Vietnam, had similar effects. But in the digital era, such images move at lightning speed, often without the scrutiny of an editor.

Anuradha Bhasin, executive editor of “The Kashmir Times,” one of Jammu and Kashmir’s oldest newspapers, said that journalists need to consider the pitfalls of uploading photographs of victims. “How is it that we circulate those pictures, and in what context?” she asks.

But she acknowledges that the problem is hardly exclusive to journalists. The very nature of digital networks — in which anyone can easily copy and re-share an image or video — guarantees that a piece of content may always exist or resurface somehow. Indeed, there is no surefire recourse for people like Sofi or Dar. But intervention by the courts or by major internet companies can make a difference, by reducing or even prohibiting their distribution.

Apar Gupta, an Indian legal expert and the executive director of the New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation, points to “the right to be forgotten,” part of Europe’s data privacy and security law, the General Data Protection Regulation. The provision allows any person convicted of a crime, after serving their sentence or being proved innocent, to demand the erasure of their personal data. Companies like Google have built substantial systems for processing and adjudicating “right to be forgotten” claims in Europe.

Although some other jurisdictions have legal frameworks that help people assert a right to their image, most countries, India included, do not have comprehensive data protection laws that might help people facing these situations.

Gupta said that the right to be forgotten requires a clearer definition than what is on the books in Europe, as it can be subject to misuse by people in positions of power, politicians in particular, who may seek to cleanse the internet of information that might harm their reputations.

“At present, the right to be forgotten is being litigated in several cases in India where people are asking for their personal details to be removed from search engine results regarding cases in which they have litigated,” he added.

In India, a data protection bill addressing the right to be forgotten was tabled in Parliament in 2019. Although petitioners have brought data protection cases to multiple courts, the issue has yet to be backed by statute.

The internet never forgets

Social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube also have a role to play here, as major distributors of these kinds of images. But none of the leading companies provide a mechanism for people to ask that their images be removed from these sites, unless the images already violate the sites’ content rules covering things like nudity and gratuitous violence. The photos in question do not fall into this category — it is the context in which they were taken that makes them so powerful.

But artificial intelligence and human moderators at social media companies are capable of blocking content and drastically reducing its circulation, said Maknoon Wani, an incoming graduate at the Oxford Internet Institute.

“What internet providers, social media companies, and other content curators can do is limit the reach, they can try to scrub it as efficiently as possible. It can be removed to an extent that a common internet user cannot access that content,” said Wani. “A child or a person who might get traumatized because of that photo or video will not be exposed to that content.”

If social media companies allowed users to ask for content to be removed on these grounds, it could help to reduce the long-tail effects of these kinds of images for their subjects. But there is no indication that this will happen any time soon.

Zoya Mir, a clinical psychologist based in Kashmir, spoke with me about how photos like this can compound mental health issues for people in these situations, who have already experienced a serious trauma. Part of the challenge, especially for young people like Sofi, lies in finding a way to move on. For people in any conflict zone, the internet makes this uniquely difficult.

“By putting an image on the internet, we break the notion of something actually being over,” said Mir. “We put it on a continuum, that is forever.”

The post ‘I cannot hide’: Viral photos from Kashmir conflict haunt subjects for years appeared first on Coda Story.