(CNN) Daily, being a woman in India feels like an achievement. Currently, marriage laws between India's majority Hindu population and minority Muslims are being drafted in five states, all of which are led by the right-wing, Hindu nationalist, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). All of them seek to ban something that doesn't actually exist: "love jihad," an Islamophobic term referring to a purported phenomenon in which Muslim men marry women of other faiths — especially Hindu women — to convert them to Islam. Some right-wing Hindus claim that this alleged "conversion" results in a threat to women's safety, citing tragedies like the reported murder of a Hindu woman last month by a young Muslim man as proof of "love jihad." Despite this case, as the push for these new laws unfolded, the Hindu-nationalist BJP had admitted in Parliament that no case of "love jihad" had ever been identified.

Source: The Nation December 02, 2020 21:00 UTC