By CJP Team

Over the past several weeks, Maharashtra has witnessed a sustained, carefully choreographed campaign by Hindutva organisations to force the state government into enacting a stringent anti-conversion—popularly framed as an ‘anti–love jihad’—law. This mobilisation has unfolded across districts, collectorate offices, public halls, hotels, and street protests, synchronised with the Maharashtra Assembly’s winter session. What is emerging is not an organic public movement responding to demonstrable harm, but a familiar political strategy: manufacture a moral panic, project it as a civilisational crisis, and use street pressure to push through extraordinary criminal legislation that intrudes deeply into private life.

Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), along with women’s rights groups, constitutional lawyers, and minority rights organisations, has repeatedly cautioned that such laws—already operational in several BJP-ruled states—have functioned less as safeguards against coercion and more as tools for communal profiling, moral policing, and the criminalisation of adult consensual relationships. Maharashtra is now being pushed to replicate a model that is not only deeply abusive in practice but also under active constitutional challenge before the Supreme Court of India.

It is essential to note that previously, the Maharashtra Government had issued a Government resolution on December 13, 2022, following the gruesome murder of Shraddha Walkar in Delhi allegedly by her inter-faith live-in partner, forming a committee to provide a platform to ‘counsel, communicate and resolve’ issues between couples and families. According to the GR, the committee can seek information of both registered and unregistered marriages. Furthermore, the committee can intervene at the behest of any person, which the plea alleges is a breach of the couple’s privacy “especially when two consenting adults are married to each other”. A challenge against the same, filed by CJP, remains pending in the Bombay High Court. Details of the petition may be read here.

A state-wide, synchronized campaign- Event by event

The scale and coordination of the recent mobilisations are striking. On November 27, in Jalgaon, the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti organised an ‘Anti–Love Jihad’ protest where speakers openly demanded that the Maharashtra Chief Minister ensure the passage of an anti-conversion law in the upcoming winter session of the Assembly. The demand was framed as a matter of urgency and inevitability. Organisers claimed support from over 35 organisations, cited more than 300 citizen statements, and referenced a petition purportedly carrying 15,000 signatures—figures repeatedly invoked to manufacture the impression of overwhelming public consensus.

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As the Assembly session approached, the campaign intensified. On December 5, in Amravati, far-right organisations led by the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti submitted a memorandum to the District Collector, addressed to the Chief Minister and Deputy Chief Minister, demanding a ‘strict’ law against the alleged conspiracy of ‘love jihad’. A signature campaign claiming the support of over 3,000 citizens accompanied the submission, making explicit that the objective was legislative pressure during the session rather than redressal of any specific grievance.

This story was originally published in cjp.org.in. Read the full story here.