New Yorker: The year of love jihad in India

by Guest Tue Jan 02, 2018 7:52 am

In Rajasthan, schoolteachers attend fairs to learn about love jihad. In Kolkata, Hindu men are encouraged to fall in love with Muslim women as a form of counteroffensive. One key turned. The day after the couple’s meeting, a video surfaced that abruptly replaced Hadiya in the national mind. I watched it after spending days bracing myself, and then, too, only in a corner at home late one night. In the footage I saw, a Muslim laborer, later identified as Mohammad Afrazul, apparently unaware that he is being filmed, strolls under a tree, while another man, holding a pickaxe, jogs up behind him, takes aim, and lodges it in his upper back. Afrazul turns around, uncomprehending. “What did I do, sir?” he manages to shout. His attacker, later identified as Shambhulal Regar, from a town north of Udaipur, stumbles between blows, preparing to strike again. The camera follows, at a distance. “I am dead, I am dead,” Afrazul cries. Finally, he lies motionless where he has fallen. Regar speaks to the camera. “Jihadis,” he says, breathing deeply. “This is what will happen to you if you spread love jihad in our country.” Then he sets Afrazul on fire. (I later discovered that I had watched an edited version of even more violent footage.)

Hours after the video appeared, the Rajasthan state police brought Regar before a group of reporters. One journalist asked if he felt regret. “I am a regular man,” he replied from under a hood. By then, support for his actions had swelled. “Brother, we should chop up each and every one of these Muslims,” one person wrote in the comments section below the video online. Dozens of others offered their support. A fund drive for Regar’s wife raised more than three hundred thousand rupees (equivalent to nearly five thousand U.S. dollars). To prevent rallies from forming in support of Regar, as well as those calling for his death, the nearby city of Udaipur did what worried officials everywhere in India do these days: they banned gatherings of more than four people and turned off the Internet. Even so, on December 14th, as the light dimmed in the city, a man in a saffron-orange shirt climbed the newly inaugurated gate of the local court building and vigorously waved a flag dyed a luminous orange—a declaration of Hindu supremacy over the police and the courts.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2017-in-review/the-year-of-love-jihad-in-india