Samuel P Huntington in his classic work The Clash of Civilizations had hit the nail on the head when he made this trenchant observation: “World politics is entering a new phase, in which the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of international conflict will be cultural. Civilizations – the highest cultural groupings of people – are differentiated from each other by religion, history, language, and tradition. These divisions are deep and increasing in importance. From Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Central Asia, the fault lines of civilizations are the battle lines of the future”.
The phenomenon of ‘love jihad’ needs to be seen as representing a facet of the clash of civilizations. Over one thousand million Hindus if converted can become a global changemaker to either of the two foreign religions that have pitched camp in India for the past few centuries. No stone has been left unturned in this lawless game of conversion.
“Killing a belief could be worse than killing a human being. When you kill a human, you take their life, but when you take their faith, they are left without hope, without meaning,” observes Nimish Dayalu in Caveman’s Secret Sauce: Finding Answers to the World’s Oldest Questions. Hence, the strategy to ridicule Hindu beliefs, traditions, culture and heritage.
In this process, which has been a continuous one for centuries, the range of tactics has stretched from internecine wars, abductions, mass rapes, to luring with money, food, education, medical treatment and even marriages. The last mentioned is currently creating a cyclone in a tea cup, all across India and also globally, as a film The Kerala Story has opened a can of worms.
Religiously illiterate Hindu girls become soft targets for fundamentalist snipers, out to convert, marry, transport them to terror hot spots, and abandon them for use by foreign terrorists sexually.
Statistics of missing women across India are alarming. In Odisha, there has been a 73% rise in missing minor girls in 2022. Over 40,000 women went missing in Gujarat over the course of five years, as per official statistics.
According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, 7,105 women went missing in 2016, 7,712 in 2017, 9,246 in 2018, and 9,268 in 2019. In 2020, 8,290 women were reported to have gone missing. The total number adds up to 41,621.
West Bengal, had the highest number of missing women from 2016-2020, with 1,43,102 cases reported. In Tamil Nadu, the number of missing women during the same period was 53,780. Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of over 20 crore people, had 25,535 missing women reported during the same period.
National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) 2018 report shows that Karnataka was among the top 10 states in India with the maximum number of missing women cases. Similar reports are emerging from Andhra Pradesh, where in 2019 the official records revealed that 2,100 women are missing.
The Ministry of Home Affairs, National Crime Records Bureau’s ‘Report on Missing Women and Children in India’ does not maintain any statistics about women who have gone missing, who were trapped in conversion rackets, subjugated by using deadly narcotics, sexually abused, transported to West Asian countries, for use as sex slaves.
Obviously, the Ministry of Home Affairs has to do a lot of homework, investigation and effective prosecution to bring the offenders to book. The problem is that our legal tools like the Indian Penal Code and Indian Evidence Act are woefully inadequate and totally outdated to tackle emerging new dimensions in traditional crimes.
Hence abductors, transporters, rapists, converters, drug-traffickers, all go scot-free.
Weaponising fake love-marriages, narcotics consumption, Arabic food, language and culture, for bringing about demographic, cultural and religious changes, appear apparently innocuous, but are fraught with dangerous and far-reaching consequences.
This is happening on a global scale but the additional problem facing India is the massive Hindu millions who are utterly ignorant about their religion and heritage. Temples are taken-over by state governments, and their administrations packed with atheists, those professing foreign faiths and looters.
Religious education for Hindus is denied, while full encouragement being given to other faiths to freely propagate and market their faiths. In fact, conversions from Hinduism itself is encouraged by giving reservation and other benefits to fresh converts in many southern states.
There is a deliberate hidden agenda and policy to encourage religious conversions and bring about electoral changes. It was never imagined by the makers of the Constitution that a day would come, when even the religious illiteracy of the Hindu masses could be made malleable and moulded to cause political changes.
Unless the government imposes tight restrictions on religious conversions, like in West Asian countries, as also in many South Asian countries, the internal security situation in India will deteriorate badly, and may also become an international menace.
The judiciary itself is helpless as there are a lot of undefined and loose terms like ‘secularism’, ‘minority’, ‘law and order’ floating around creating havoc in every sphere. ‘Secularism’ needs to be replaced by ‘respect for every religion’, ‘minority’ needs to be replaced by ‘second, third, and fourth largest majority’ and strict conditions need to be imposed with special monitoring for all Special Marriages Act cases.
Stern message needs to be sent out that ‘law and order’ is not for politicians to decide, claiming it as a state subject, national security is not negotiable under any circumstances.
Every citizen and politician should remember that democracy and secularism are flourishing only because of the magnanimity of the Hindus, the day that equation changes, family rule, multi-parties, languages and diverse cultures will all be crushed and trampled.
The central government and every state government is, therefore, duty-bound to protect each and every faith, and citizens need to be protected from predators and purveyors of foreign faiths, hunting for fresh prey, luring them with marriage contracts and euphoric drugs.
The author is IRS (Rtd), Ph.D. (Narcotics), Former Director General, National Academy of Customs, Indirect Taxes & Narcotics (NACIN). The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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