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Civil Code, De Facto

Hindu-Muslim marriages give saffronites in MP an excuse for 'righteous' upheaval

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Civil Code, De Facto
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Bhopal's Hour Of Marital Crisis
  • The city came close to a riot last fortnight over a Muslim boy marrying a Sindhi-Hindu girl.
  • The Bajrang Dal has formed a Hindu Kanya Suraksha Committee.
  • The Sindhi panchayat wanted their girls to stop using mobiles or riding two-wheelers and to abandon the city's fashion of covering their heads and faces Islamic style.
  • The state CID keeps tabs on all Hindu-Muslim marriages.
  • According to one list distributed by the Bajrang Dal, 341 such marriages have taken place between 1997-2004.
  • Families of Muslim boys who run away with Hindu girls are harassed by the police.
  • The Muslim community has responded to the latest uproar with a dignified silence.

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Outlook
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Bhopal girls cover their heads against the dust, but for Sindhis it’s Islamic

That both Umar and Rehan have converted to Hinduism is not enough to wash their sins. "It's meaningless," says Sabnani. "Done under pressure." With the families of both boys under attack in Bhopal, the Hindu conversion could indeed have been a tactical move. For Sabnani, there is no doubt: "In no time, they will reconvert." The most sensible thing for the couple to have done was to marry under the Special Marriages Act, but it's a long bureaucratic process that requires a month's notice during which anyone can object to the proposed marriage.

Incidentally, of Umar's eight brothers, the eldest too is married to a Hindu, Aparajita Sharma, daughter of a police DG and an IAS officer herself. Reports in the media said the second daughter-in-law too was a Hindu but she is in fact Muslim, and goes by the name of Zeba. The rest of the brothers are unmarried. When Umar disappeared with Priyanka, it was Zeba's husband and Umar's brother who was picked up by the police and questioned repeatedly for five days.

All their connections and wealth can't stop Umar's family from feeling nervous, enough for them to refuse being photographed or be directly quoted. They say people who tried to help them were asked to lay off by the highest authorities in the state. The police would land up at their house at odd hours and without warrants. Umar's conversion is hardly an issue for them. As a family member says, "He is a 22-year-old child. We are worried only about his security and health." Currently the family has round-the-clock police protection.

Hardly surprising, as many think that the state government would have allowed a riot had the regime in Delhi been friendly. But as Sajid Ali, a senior lawyer and Congressman, says, "We recently complained to the minority commission in Delhi how there have been 112 incidents of communal tension since theBJP came to power." Ultimately, the BJP dispensation decided to back off and told its Bajrang Dal/VHP cadres not to agitate further. Even the devout doubted the intentions of the agitators. The general secretary of the All India Sindhi Sadhu Samaj, Mahant Baba Ramdas Udaseen, told Outlook: "Social outrage is not surprising in such cases. But these days such issues are also highlighted for the political agenda of dividing communities."

And no one did it better than the parivar outfits in Bhopal. They made political capital out of the state's practice of tabulating such marriages, something it has no business doing. The Bajrang Dal went to town distributing an 'official' list of 341 Hindu-Muslim marriages in Bhopal between 1997 and 2004. Hardly an alarming figure but enough to reinforce parivar lore of venal Muslim characters pursuing innocent Hindu damsels. Some years ago, VHP leader Acharya Giriraj Kishore had gone on record to tell this correspondent: "There is a physical reason Muslims can seduce Hindu girls. They give them more sharirik anand (physical pleasure) because they have a surgery, Hindus don't." In Kishore's view, circumcision is the Muslim's secret weapon. In the face of such seductive logic, can reason have a chance?

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