To Jihad with Hate

                                                                 To Jihad with Hate

Love Jihad- what a queer juxtaposition of two words that are a pair of contrary terms! Love is a tender feeling of affection and solicitude. Opposed to it is Jihad  an Islamic term that originally meant as a holy war against infidels but now reckoned all over the globe as a legitimate crusade for battle cry  or a war whoop in support of  an idea or principle. The phrase ‘love Jihad’ thus lends itself to two contradictory interpretations- either it exhorts one to love ‘Jihad’ or to jihad against love. In either case one of the two words functions as a verb.

But when the two words are used as nouns, Love Jihad becomes an oxymoron since it juxtaposes two irreconcilable passions.  It has become a convenient phrase for politicians and learned commentators who are ubiquitous on the TV channels to rail against love in the first place, to feel outraged at inter-religious love as a source of trickery and deceit and to assert the supremacy of patriarchy which claims for itself the custodianship of women’s wisdom and morals. The male moral police arrogate to itself the task to enforce mindless and imbecile Hindu women to abstain from falling in love and thereby perpetuate the age old arranged marriage in the Hindu tradition where the male elders choose the grooms for their young women. In short, all this hullaballoo about Love Jihad is to put women in veils in the name of protecting them from forced conversion by the male predators belonging to religions other than Hinduism. It is ironical that the notorious phrase ‘honour killing’ belongs to our Khap panchayats who decide summary killing of Hindu couples who marry outside their class and caste within their own religion.

In modern times when women are no longer confined to the purdah in the kitchen and find a life of their own outside the four walls of their homes, it is a throwback to paternalistic atavism that denies women their rights and responsibilities even to fall in love. Love Jihad like the Khap panchayat diktats sees communal ghosts where there are none. In Kerala and Karnataka where this phrase was making fearsome rounds cautioning women against falling in love with Muslims in Hindus’ coats, investigations have revealed no incidens involving Hindu girls marrying Muslim men posing as Hindus and being subjected to forcible conversion to Islam.

 This fringe group of Hindu male chauvinists suffer from a phobic disorder of Islam and Christianity and try to whip up communal passions under the pretext of protecting Hindu women. They fail to understand that among all human emotions love is unique as it is beyond boundaries of caste, class, religion and nationality. The essence of love is the complete identification of the lover and the beloved, unmindful of all barriers that cast their shadow lines on it. It was the lily white Desdemona who told Othello, the black moor “I see my visage in thee” to affirm her total identification with her lover. Heer Ranjha, Romeo and Juliet, Sohni Mahiwal , Layla and Majnun, Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, Salim and Anarkali  are all tragic romances where consummate and unqualified love is destroyed by passions antithetical to such exalted bonding between a man and a woman. It is often said that the highest form of love between man and woman is akin to spiritual love( no blasphemy intended). John Donne has immortalized love thus

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest ;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west ?
Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally ;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

It is time for modern young India to rise up and protest against the phrase Love Jihad and replace it with Hate Jihad. The 21^st century started with the banging of the twin towers of New York, an explosion of animosity between religious fundamentalism and material Mcworld civilization. Peace and the triumph of humanity today seek new concepts and ideas to get rid of mindless violence and hatred. We need to cultivate Hate Jihad  to save humanity from total annihilation in the name of religious conflict.   Hate Jihad can be used both as two verbs or two nouns in the same way Love Jihad has been interpreted. The world should hate Jihad and Jihad against hate of all kinds.

India can show the way by ignoring the fringe group of  ‘Love Jihadists’ and educating fellow citizens   to understand and  appreciate human love which can unify the complex global relationship between people of diverse origins, cultures and religions hailing from different geographical, economic and social backgrounds.