Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti

When the religion-based data of India’s Census was released last week, two kinds of headlines did the rounds. The first talked about the birth rate of Muslims going down, and the other about the total population of Muslims rising over the years. With a large part of the electorate ever ready for their communal sentiments to be stoked, it was inevitable that Indian politicians would re-widen old fault lines. So this week, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Minister of State for Food Processing, decided to launch a sequel to the ‘Beti Bachao’ campaign, one that aligns her even more with her Hindutva agenda.

“The Hindu community should protect their daughters from the influence of non- believers,” she said at a religious function in Kerala. It was a wafer-thin attempt to borrow an old trope from the ‘Love Jihad’ campaign: Hindu girls are but vulnerable creatures who wear their hearts on their sleeves, thus making them susceptible to Muslim men who marry and convert them. If people had any doubt about which group of ‘non-believers’ she was warning them against, she quickly clarified herself by adding that the findings of the Census were “disturbing and would destroy the moral fabric of the country”.

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