India’s police need to stop policing women’s choices

Similar to their colonial predecessors, Indian police are obsessed with policing defiant daughters – not defending their rights.

Representational image | Ramandeep Kaur | ThePrint

Praveen Swami, The Print, 1 January, 2023: Escorted by police and flanked by thousands of excited villagers, the teenage bride entered her home resplendent in red, her arms covered in conch-shell bangles, and vermillion streaked on her forehead. Local Hindus alleged that Jashoda Sundari, the wife of Dalit day labourer Rajani Kanta Nath, had been kidnapped by a Muslim mob. Fed up with poverty and her husband’s ill treatment, lawyers for the accused Muslims responded, Jashoda had in fact left home after converting to Islam.

The Chittagong magistrate who decided the case in 1926, carved Jasodha up: “Her body belonged to the Muslims by virtue of her conversion, and to her husband by marriage,” historian Pradip Kumar Datta records.

Ever since the savage killing of Shraddha Walkar in New Delhi, the century-old debates over what is now called ‘love-jihad’, spearheaded by the Hindu Right, have become increasingly intense. Across India, Hindu nationalist groups are pushing for more aggressive laws to stop women from being seduced or coerced into interfaith relationships. 

Actress Tunisha Sharma, Raichur flower-shop workers Bharati and Rehan, Tannu Sharma and Irfan Sheikh: Like in late-colonial India, interfaith relationships have become a bitterly contested issue, mired in a toxic politics of religious identity.

The story of Jasodha – and many like her in late-colonial India – shows how the policing of women ends up denying them agency and disempowering those whose lives are in danger because of abusive relationships. The time has come for India to stop policing women’s choices and police the men who endanger them instead.

Defiant daughters and dangerous liaisons

Loving can be a dangerous thing. The killing of defiant daughters cuts across faiths. Aayushi Chaudhary, Vijaya Kamble, and Amina Khatun were all killed in recent months in the name of religious and caste honour. Khushi Ahmad’s marriage to a Hindu sparked riots in New Delhi. Last year, Sarvesh Kumar infamously paraded down a Hardoi street with his daughter’s severed head.

Ever since the nineteenth century, India’s caste and religious communities have savagely guarded against the transgression of sexual rules. Even when women have asserted their relationships or religious conversions were voluntary – just as Jasodha did – their partners have sometimes ended up in prison.

1872 onwards, the colonial State opened up space for couples to marry across religious lines – but only if they renounced their own faith. Furious protests flowed in, Perveez Mody writes. A group of Meerut residents claimed “women of this country are generally uneducated and lack sufficient discrimination, and men of bad character would have little difficulty inducing them to go before a registrar.” The biggest concern was the transgression of caste.

The colonial police often found themselves enmeshed in these disputes. The Indian Penal Code, enacted in 1860, cast women as potential victims of enticement and abduction. The law codified the notion of being seduced into illicit intercourse, which meant sexual relationships other than with husbands. The law was often used to press for State action to end transgressive relationships.

Contemporary Bengali true-crime fiction tells us women in colonial India did have desires – desires that provoked fear in men then, as they do today. Literature was full of women who had secret liaisons with lovers, and eloped with inappropriate men. The modern Indian police force, set up in 1861, was charged with enforcing these norms – not defending women’s sexual choices.

The rise of ‘love jihad’

In the late nineteenth century, ‘love jihad’ was imagined into existence as competing Hindu and Muslim revivalist movements fought to secure the frontiers of communal identity. The bodies of women became the terrain of contestation between Hindu nationalism and Islamic revivalism. Fiction in Hindi, historian Charu Gupta records, became awash with “sexually-charged, lustful Muslim men violating the pure body of Hindu women.” Across northern India, warning Hindus of an existential threat from the forced conversion of women to Islam. “They roam with carts through cities and villages,” one particularly lurid pamphlet claimed, “and take away women who are put behind the veil and made Muslims.”

‘Love jihad’ flared into conflict on several occasions: The affair between Kanpur deputy commissioner Raza Ali and a Hindu widow in 1924 led to mass protests, while riots broke out after rumours of an abduction spread across Mathura four years later. Like today, vigilante organisations were set up to enforce norms.

“In Jaunpur, in 1927, a Muslim and his wife were twice stopped by Arya Samajists in Shahganj and the woman was forced to show her face and hands in order to prove that she was not a Hindu being abducted,” Gupta has recorded.

The purported victims of these abductions were generally returned to their families in an effort to keep the peace and maintain colonial authority. The women themselves, police records show, were rarely consulted.

The politics of tainted blood

Through the Second World War, historian Yasmin Khan has written, concerns over miscegenation flared again. Famine in Bengal had led to a surge in sex work, coinciding with the arrival of large numbers of American and African troops in starvation-hit Bengal. Muslim League leader Abul Kasem Fazlul Huq complained that he had been barred from raising questions in the Legislative Assembly about 30,000 Muslim women who he alleged had been sent to serve Allied soldiers.

“In the veins of some American blood will flow, in others English, while in others again the blood of Indian soldiers of different communities will flow,” the Delhi newspaper Ansari lamented. “An entire generation of bastards will thus come amongst us.” “Limit the cinema and the dance hall,” The Anglo-Indian Review exhorted women from the community, “and take to the kitchen and the sewing machine.”

Fears over miscegenation haunted the other side of the imperial relationship, too. Although the United States military commanders accepted the reality that their soldiers in India would have sex, they prohibited troops from marrying while serving in southern Asia. Lieutenant General Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell privately said the rule was intended “to prevent the mixed calamities that would develop.” Even though the new republic promised equality for women, their choices continued to be proscribed by the deepest tyranny – tradition.

Five hundred people had gathered in the village of Mehrana, near Mathura, to watch the parents of the couple tighten the noose around the necks of their teenage children. Eighteen-year-old Vijendra Jatav had been tortured through the night for having dared to elope with a higher-caste girl, Roshni. He was hung upside down while lathi blows were delivered on the soles of his feet and legs. A burning rag was shoved into his mouth.

Then, in the morning, Vijendra and Roshni were taken out and hanged from a banyan tree, together with the friend who helped them elope. Eight men were eventually sentenced to life for the 1991 crime – and community leaders hailed them as heroes. “I would have done the same,” farmer leader Mahendra Singh Tikait proclaimed in the wake of the killings .

Like thousands before and after them, Roshni and Vijendra could not turn to the police. Even though the law guaranteed them protection, the couple knew the State drew its legitimacy from upholding tradition and not the rights of women.

Three decades on, little has changed. Funds meant to enhance police protection for women have been wasted, while funds meant for setting up helplines and crisis centres to support victims of sexual crimes remain unspent.

The inexorable price of choice – and adulthood – is risk. Like so many other women, Shraddha Walkar entered a toxic relationship, which had terrible consequences.

The State needs to enable women to seek the help they need – not punish the choices they make. The question that should be haunting India is why she felt unable to seek help from either the police or her family, not her choice of partner.

The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Tarannum Khan)