Kerala ‘Love Jihad’ girl in Delhi to appear in SC
Trivandrum: neo-converthadiya, 24, whose marriage with a muslim man the Kerala High Court annulled on May 24, lew to New Delhi on Saturday to appear before the Supreme Court.
The apex court issued the order to produce her on a petition iled by Shain Jehan who had married her under Sharia customs which the lower court described as a “sham” and that the ‘radical organisations convert young girls of Hindu religion on the pretext of love’.
The court, which sent her to her parents who allegedly prevented her going out and meeting people, including journalists, however, upheld her right to practice her new faith and she had been following it strictly at home.
“I want to go with my husband,” she shouted at the reporters at the airport as the accompanying women oficers pulled her along and others tried hard to ensure the television cameras did not get closer.
“I embraced Islam at my own will. There was no compulsion. Shain Jahan is my husband. I am a Muslim. I should get justice. That’s the only thing that I want to say.” She stepped out of her house wearing the traditional Islamic dress in the afternoon along with her parents under heavy police protection to catch the evening light from the Cochin International Airport.
The police had made massive deployment along her way to prevent her speaking to reporters who were closely following the turn of events for the last many months. Five oficers are also accompanying the family.
Rights activists had come out against the “house arrest” of the woman, previously known by her Hindu name Akhila A so kan, not allowing her to meet people she wanted to, though her parents denied it.
Giving credence to them, rahuleasw ar, the scion of the chief priests of Sabarimala hill shrine, the busiest Hindu pilgrimage centre, who got a rare chance to speak to her, released a video in which she said she was being conined to home and tortured.
Her father is a proclaimed agnostic and mother a devout Hindu. Though she complained of torture at home under police protection 24X7, a police report to the State Women’s Commission said that was not true.
The issue drew national attention with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party alleging “Love Jihad”, a coinage of rightwing Hindu groups to describe Muslim men falling in love with others for conversions.
Unlike other boy-meets-girl stories, Jehan met the young homoeopath through a match making website after she embraced Islam. Her father KM Ashokan insists that he was not against his daughter practising any religion but fears the groom had Daesh links.
But she began the process of conversion as early as in 2015 and married Jahan only on Dec.19 the next year. Ashokan moved the court immediately after she left home in January 2016 and started appearing in headscarf proclaiming her new faith.
He contended that her converters had extremist links and they would smuggle her out to Syria. But the court upheld her right to be independent until her groom appeared in the court on Dec.21, two days after their marriage.
All eyes are now on what the woman is going to tell the court on Monday. The apex court had also ordered the anti-terror National Investigation Agency to probe if the marriage had any links with terrorists.
The Hindu right-wingers had stepped up their campaign after three new-converts, two of them Christians and one Hindu, left the country along with their husbands and suspected to have joined Daesh.
To cash in on the fear created among Hindu families, the BJP last month organised a statewide roadshow against the “Red and Jihadi Terror” alleging a nexus between the ruling communists and the so-called hardliner extremists.
Hadiya was attracted to Islam while she was sharing a house with two Muslim girls who were her classmates in the neighbouring Tamil Nadu state pursuing her studies in homoeopathy.
She later reached Sathya Sarani, a centre for Islamic learning in the Muslimdominated Malappuram district run by Popular Front of India, whom others accuse of having extremist links.
Asokan soon approached the High Court to locate her as she had stopped communicating with him, away at college and kicked off a protracted legal battle that is now awaiting the apex court verdict.