Mumbai: Each week, for the last three years, a group of men in their 20s and 30s would assemble in the eastern Mumbai suburb of Ghatkopar and tick items off a checklist:
Had any of them spotted a Muslim man with a Hindu girl?
Had there been any new case of ‘love jihad’ that had reached their ears?
What were the updates on the old ones they had fought?
The men would then pool their intelligence: reports from ‘sleeper cells’, consisting of unnamed Hindutva sympathisers spread across localities, social media posts or just about anything else that would have alerted them to more cases of inter-faith relationships between Muslim men and Hindu women.
For these men, fighting love jihad—the unproven conspiracy theory espoused by Hindutva outfits about Muslim men luring Hindu women into a relationship in a bid to convert them to Islam—is akin to a full-time job.
Leading them is 40-year-old Bajrang Dal vigilante, Omprakash Yadav, a teacher at a private school in Mumbai, who spends as much time breaking up couples as he does teaching students.
“I finish teaching in the afternoon, and soon afterwards, I am on the task, either on the ground or on the phone, coordinating with workers,” Yadav said.
Much of his time is spent going in and out of police stations, pressing police men to lodge complaints against Muslim men for eloping with Hindu women.
Convincing The Police
Elsewhere in Mumbai, 22-year-old A*, a Bajrang Dal volunteer, is scrolling through Instagram posts and stories uploaded by young men and women.
“If we find any posts from Hindu women or Muslim men showing them to be in an interfaith relationship with each other, we start tracking them,” said A. “We first gather intelligence about such couples, then contact their families, and convince them to oppose such relationships.”
For both Yadav and A, convincing the cops to act against such couples was an arduous task.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
