The end of Shraddha Walkar, raised to turn a woke rebel by apparently callous Hindu parents who cared only when it was too late, is the saga of wrong upbringing more than love jihad. For, when the prey is ready to be devoured, one cannot blame the predator. This is a story recurring in one Hindu household after another at an alarming rate, thanks to money-minded, ideally pluralist, occasionally religious people where neither the father nor the mother — both professionals in the urban set-up — takes up the responsibility of exposing the child to world history, with focus on religion and religious communities. Such exposure, even without moral lectures, would be enough to sensitise a person to the fact that all religions are not equal; far from it. It is expected that the two religions originating in the Middle Eastern deserts, with one capturing territories in the West and the other left to maraud towards the East, will behave the way they do because it is mentioned in no unambiguous terms in their scriptures that converting the world is what every believer ought to do. Of the two, the second further says that a man can beat his wife (albeit gently, as in the Qur’an, Surah an Nisa 4:34), that women from annexed territories can be treated as sex slaves (with the repugnant phrase “whom your right hand possesses” in the Qur’an, Surah al Mu’minun 23:6) and that children of prisoners of war can be employed in bonded labour or killed at will (recall the Hadith of Sahih Bukhari that Tahreek-e-Taliban Pakistan left back in pamphlets after killing children of soldiers in a Peshawar school).
When the ilk of Shraddha Walkar basks in the unfounded glory of social illiteracy, they invite the Aftab Poonawalas of society. What is as revolting as the 35 pieces of her body disposed of one by one across Delhi is some other Hindu women of the type offering an apology for Islamism, saying they have Muslim partners too but are not abused at home. At the same time, there is a silly attempt by a section of the so-called Hindu right, which inadvertently gives the Muslim side a clean chit. They are saying, following the gruesome murder, such cases are “not love jihad” because the victims asked for it with their wanton rebellion against their parents’ sane counsel! Whoever said that love jihad necessarily must involve impersonation by the Muslim man as Hindu? And whoever said it perforce culminates in murder? That all former girlfriends of Aftab were Hindu — and the woman he brought home while Shraddha’s body parts lay stashed in a refrigerator at the location was Hindu too — is indicative of the fact that he had a clear conversion agenda. Even if he ends up marrying one and the couple lives peacefully thereafter, the man gets not only a Muslim woman who was once a Hindu but also their children who will be raised as Muslims. Love jihad is a demographic engineering drive. Determining whether a case is of love jihad does not depend on the woman’s naïveté but the man’s objective. What appears rightly or wrongly as love to the woman is unambiguously jihad for the man.
Shraddha eventually wanted to leave Aftab, as a friend has now shared with the media. Her parents, whom she had abandoned to pursue her ‘love’ life, were concerned twice: Once when she said she was seeing this Muslim man and then at the time her social media updates stopped and the father panicked. What Shraddha did not learn from the Qur’an and the Ahadith, she must have realised during her live-in. What her parents did not do while raising her, they must have regretted not doing when they saw what apathetic parenting turns a child into. Both the late realisations amounted to shutting the stable door when the horse had bolted. You cannot begin to regret entering the jungle when the tiger has pounced on you already, pending the lethal swipe of a paw.
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