It was against that backdrop of fear that Mullah and Kumbhar began dating in late 2018 in the city of Belagavi in the southern state of Karnataka. Hundreds of Muslim men have been assaulted, and many couples have been forced to go into hiding. Nonetheless, rights groups say violence against interfaith couples has increased in recent years, perpetrated by hard-line Hindu nationalists out to stop such relationships. Census data show the country’s religious mix has been stable since 1951, and India remains predominantly Hindu with Muslims making up about 14% of its nearly 1.4 billion people. India’s National Investigation Agency and some court rulings have rejected the “love jihad” theory as baseless. “To lure somebody through financial means, or some coercion, or some sort of motive to convert, that is not acceptable,” Agarwal said. Gopal Krishna Agarwal, a BJP spokesman, said the party has no objection in principle to interfaith marriages, which are legal, but suggested that concerns about “love jihad” are valid. “This conspiracy theory demonizes the Muslim as the other and creates victimhood and fears in the Hindus that India is going to be converted into a Muslim country,” said Mohan Rao, a retired professor of social sciences at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University who has researched interfaith marriage. The “love jihad” issue has pitted the BJP against secular activists who warn it undermines constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and puts Muslims in the crosshairs of Hindu nationalists, emboldened by a prime minister who has mostly stayed mum about rising attacks on Muslims since he was first elected in 2014. While interfaith unions between Hindus and Muslims are rare in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, and other Hindu nationalists have decried what they call “love jihad.” The discredited conspiracy theory holds that supposedly predatory Muslim men deceive women to coerce them into changing their religion, with the aim of establishing domination in the majority-Hindu nation. 28, his bloodied and dismembered body was found on a stretch of railroad tracks. They did exactly that, according to police. The romance so angered relatives of Kumbhar, a Hindu, that they allegedly hired members of a hard-line Hindu nationalist group to kill 24-year-old Mullah, who was Muslim.
But those secret vows would never be fulfilled. Over nearly three years, their courtship in many ways resembled that of any other couple and they made each other promises to get married. BELAGAVI, India (AP) - Arbaz Mullah’s love story began, as romances often do, when he first laid eyes on the woman of his dreams, Shweta Kumbhar.
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