Love Jihad and Other Fictions: Simple Facts to Counter Viral Falsehoods

Love jihad, Muslim appeasement, forced conversions—these conspiracy theories are now driving everyday conversations in India. Amplified by politicians, cacophonic media coverage, and relentless social media forwards and updates, they have come to be accepted as reality by a large number of people.

But are these claims—that India’s minorities are plotting to weaken the majority Hindu community—based on the truth? Or are they fictions created and disseminated to serve the interest of power?

In this book, the authors interrogate some theories that are part of the landscape of WhatsApp chats and social media feeds of millions of Indians every day. Chapter 1 examines ‘love jihad’, perhaps the most ascendant of all these claims. Starting with the first known case of ‘love jihad’, the authors investigate arguably the only definitive list of ‘love jihad’ cases. They travel to the state where the largest number of arrests have been made under new anti-love jihad laws to explore if the crackdown is justified. Chapter 2 places ‘population jihad’—the claim that Muslims are waging a holy war by producing more children—under the scanner.

The authors crunch the numbers and trawl through parliamentary records to decode whether Muslims will indeed outnumber over a billion Hindus in the near future. Chapter 3 scrutinizes the Hindutva claim of a sinister Christian scheme to take over India through mass forced conversions. Chapter 4 examines the theory of Muslim appeasement, probing assertions like unequal availability of electricity on Diwali and Eid, the hajj subsidy, funds to madrasas, and the favourite bugbear of the Hindu Right: Muslim men being able to take up to four wives.

With its clear-eyed and scrupulously argued and researched approach, Love Jihad and Other Fictions is an indispensable antidote to the viral falsehoods threatening to tear India apart.

Sreenivasan Jain is a New Delhi-based journalist and broadcaster. In a career spanning three decades, he has reported on wars, elections, insurgencies, majoritarianism, and corruption scandals for the television network NDTV where he worked till early 2023. His investigative work and ground reportage have been recognized by the Ramnath Goenka Awards, Red Ink Awards, and New York Festivals, among others. Mariyam Alavi has reported on many of the Hindutva conspiracy theories scrutinized in this book. She worked with NDTV in New Delhi until March 2023, where she also reported on the economy, politics, and minority rights. She is the recipient of the International Press Institute-India's Award for Excellence in Journalism. Supriya Sharma has spent two decades covering conflict, politics, and development. Her reports have fetched several honours, including the Ramnath Goenka Awards and Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Woman Journalist, among others. She is currently the Executive Editor of Scroll. She lives in Delhi.