Poorvi Gupta
ON 22 August last year, Sunaina and Afraaz left their hotel in Delhi to get married at an Arya Samaj temple named Vedic Trust. All decked up in a yellow Benarsi saree, Sunaina was mildly disappointed on seeing a dingy, grimy temple on the first floor of a nondescript building in the Shahdara area of east Delhi. But she pushed the feeling aside because after a long-drawn ordeal, she was finally getting married to the person of her choice, accompanied by their family—and most importantly, lawfully.
“Hum excited bhi the aur darr bhi lag raha tha”—We were excited as well as scared—Sunaina recalled. “Bas shaadi safely ho jaye, ye hi dua kar rahe the kyunki itna jhel liya tha aur paise laga diye the humne.” (We just wanted to get married safely because we had endured enough and had spent so much money.) She worried for Afraaz’s life and that trouble might arise for their business back in her city in Uttarakhand—a fear that compelled them to marry hundreds of kilometres away from their home.
Afraaz hails from a small town in Uttar Pradesh and he moved to Uttarakhand around eight years ago in search of better opportunities. Sunaina, who is from a village in Uttarakhand, also moved to the city where she met Afraaz at a store, where she worked since 2014, and Afraaz joined in 2017. They began dating each other, and during the lockdown they disclosed to their families that they wanted to get married. It took them three years to convince their families about the marriage.
In March 2023, they began the process to get married under the Special Marriage Act, the secular law that governs marriages divorced from any religious customs. When they first filed their marriage application, they got an appointment with the sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) within a fortnight. “He called us to his office and asked me many questions about where we met, how we knew each other, and how long was our relationship,” Sunaina recalled. “He also asked my mother if she agreed to our marriage or not. He didn’t ask anything to Afraaz and his father, who had also accompanied us. Then he said that he’d call us again in a week, cautioned us not to come before that, and he kept our file.”
That call never came. “We thought that if we were doing it legally then it would be easier to get married but we didn’t know that we’d get in danger after going to the court,” Sunaina said. Eventually, she approached her uncle who worked at the court and had also helped her younger sister register an inter-caste marriage a few years ago. He told them that the SDM had been transferred, and their file was kept in abeyance in the office.
“Unhone kaha ki alag dharam wali toh abhi bilkul nahi hongi”—He told us that interfaith marriages will absolutely not happen right now—Sunaina said. “Now the Uniform Civil Code is about to be implemented, we will only find out about interfaith marriages after that.” What Sunaina’s uncle was telling them was a preposterous proposition. The state officials were purportedly preventing the registration of interfaith marriages until the implementation of the Uniform Civil Code, a law that had been passed in the state assembly but was not yet in force at the time, and despite the UCC explicitly recognising marriages solemnised under the Special Marriage Act.
Undeterred, Sunaina and Afraaz filed for registration again, in October 2023, through a different advocate who assured them that he would see it through. But he charged them Rs 10,000 and did nothing about it, Sunaina recounted. “Every time we asked him, he would say, ‘Abhi mahaul bohot garam hai. SDM baith nahi raha hai. Aap log zada mat aao yahan nahi toh aapki file leak ho jayegi. (Things are heated right now. The SDM isn’t around. Don’t come here so often or your file will get leaked.)’”
“Both of us are adults and our parents accompany us to the court every time, then where are we in the wrong?” she argued.
In their third attempt, they decided to engage a female court assistant in the civil court whom Sunaina knew, and whom they had met several times but never consulted. She asked Sunaina to get her file back from the advocate, which she did despite him warning them against it. “I trusted her and gave her my file, and she reassured me that she will fix up a meeting with the SDM,” she told the reporter. Nothing prepared them for what happened next.
Around two weeks after Sunaina and Afraaz had engaged her, the court assistant showed up with one man at the store where the couple work and began threatening her. “She started saying that they would drag me out of here and destroy my store, that RSS members would come, and they’d kill the boy,” Sunaina recalled. The Bajrang Dal is the militant wing of the Hindu supremacist group, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is in power in the state of Uttarakhand and in India, is the RSS’s political wing.
Then, the local councillor, an elected BJP member, came to Sunaina’s store with five or six men from the Bajrang Dal and two other women. The councillor pressured the owner of the building to snatch the keys of the space from Sunaina; she had rented out that space in the building to run her store. She also instructed the landlady to evict her on account of her wanting to marry a Muslim man. “Afraaz was also at the store working, so when the men found out about him, they started to beat him up,” Sunaina said. “I’d not imagined this would happen, because we had both convinced our parents. We thought if our parents were ready then who could stop us? We were wrong.”
According to Sunaina, several interfaith couples in her circle want to get married but fear intimidation and abuse from the RSS and Bajrang Dal. Following the assault, Afraaz moved to Delhi and his parents returned to their town in Uttar Pradesh. “I left for Delhi right after they came to our store because now that the Bajrang Dal knew everything about us, I feared that anything could happen to me and my family if we stayed in Uttarakhand,” Afraaz said. After getting married in Delhi, and once they got their marriage certificate, the couple moved back to Uttarakhand in October last year. “We still fear every day while going back to work,” Afraaz continued. “But our love is far greater than the fear.”
Over the course of six months, I spoke to numerous advocates, district officials, civil society activists and interfaith couples from Uttarakhand. I found that a nexus of state and Hindutva vigilantes has launched a focused attack against interfaith relationships across the state, particularly those between Muslim men and Hindu women. While the Hindu majoritarian paranoid conspiracies concerning religious conversions, “love jihad,” and demographic change are wellknown, the BJP’s rule in the state since 2017 has also seen the weaponisation of laws against interfaith couples.
The reporting revealed how the anti-conversion law is used to create additional hurdles even in secular marriages without any legal basis, how marriages under the Special Marriage Act are kept in cold storage, and how interfaith couples are asked to wait till the implementation of the Uniform Civil Code. On January 27, the Uttarakhand government officially introduced the Uniform Civil Code in the state, fulfilling a poll promise of the BJP made during the state election of 2022.
Dinesh Joshi is Sunaina’s uncle who works as an assistant at a civil court in the state, and whom she first consulted to apply for the marriage registration. According to Joshi, there have been no registrations of interfaith marriages, particularly those of Hindu-Muslim couples, since 2023. “This has been happening ever since the talk of the UCC began,” he said. “The authorities don’t take the risk. There’s an uproar, you see, fights and conflicts. RSS folks get involved, and all. Cases from other religions, like Sikh and Christian marriages, are still coming through, but cases involving Hindu woman-Muslim man marriages have stopped getting registered.”
In fact, responses to Right to Information applications seemed to echo Joshi’s claims. RTI responses from the districts of Dehradun, Almora, Haridwar and Uttarkashi all revealed barely any marriages registered under the Special Marriage Act (SMA) in the last two years, and in most cases, it’s uncertain how many of these were interfaith relationships. Chandrakala, an activist and member of the Uttarakhand Mahila Manch, who also works as an advocate in the Dehradun civil court, observed that while there are marriages that are getting registered under the SMA, those are not interfaith weddings between Hindus and Muslims. “Interfaith marriages registered under law have become a rare sight here in the last few years,” she added.
The promise of perils of the UCC
Ahead of its re-election to power in 2022, the BJP emphasised on bringing the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) as a key poll promise. In February 2024, the Dhami government passed the UCC bill, and Uttarakhand became the first state after Goa to adopt a Uniform Civil Code, which retained the Portuguese Civil Code after its liberation in 1961. The state government has now formally notified the rules to govern the code, and launched an online portal for registrations and applications. However, the actual practice of its implementation and the consequences it holds for interfaith couples on the ground remains to be seen.
Essentially, the UCC nullifies all religious personal laws that govern civil matters such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, maintenance, etc. and introduces one set of laws for everyone excluding Scheduled Tribes. In practice, however, the UCC has absorbed significant portions of the Hindu Marriage Act while largely disregarding provisions in other religious personal laws. As a result, the UCC creates the most severe shift in the personal laws governing the Muslim community, which stands as the state’s largest minority community, forming nearly 14 percent of its populace.
The UCC explicitly recognises the Special Marriage Act of 1954 as a valid ceremony for the solemnisation of a marriage. However, the UCC also mandates that all marriages must be registered under the code; that the sub-registrar presiding over this process is empowered to reject any memorandum of marriage registration submitted before them; that non-registration can invoke a fine of Rs 25,000; and that the register of marriages would be open to the public. In cases where the sub-registrar refuses to register a marriage, they will have to give the reasons in writing to the couple, but the code does not specify the grounds on which the registration can be refused.
These provisions raise concerns about their misuse to harass and intimidate interfaith couples. In fact, multiple couples I interviewed spoke about authorities already delaying or rejecting registration of marriage under the SMA without proper explanation, citing the UCC. The fact that state authorities have been cautioned against facilitating Hindu-Muslim marriages even under SMA in recent times is a dangerous precedent. The harassment of adult Hindu women by Bajrang Dal members, who receive information about interfaith couples from the registration office, will increasingly give way to increasing mob justice under the UCC.
“The intent is not protection of women’s rights but control of women’s sexuality,” said Malika Virdi, a member of the Uttarakhand Mahila Manch. She added the UCC is a politically motivated law trying to curb interfaith and inter-caste relationships. “In the Justice KS Puttaswamy vs Union of India case of 2017, the judgment establishes that the state cannot interfere in matters of sexuality, relationship and private space unless there is a crime that has taken place, and in that sense, the Domestic Violence Act takes care of it even for live-in relationships. So in a way, the UCC contradicts the Supreme Court judgment to take control over domestic decisions of adult, consenting individuals of Uttarakhand.”
The UCC mandates that consenting adults in a live-in relationship in Uttarakhand, including those who do not have a domicile, must register their relationship with the registrar, who would then conduct a “summary inquiry” in a month. The rules state that the summary inquiry would include verifying the couple’s personal details, religious leaders, and prior relationships. During this inquiry, the partners might be asked to “supply additional information or evidence” if necessary, which must then be supplied within ten days. The registrar also forwards live-in relationship statements to the local police and informs parents if either partner is under 21. The registrar can also refuse to register the relationship if the inquiry establishes that “the consent of one of the registrants has been obtained by force, coercion, undue influence, misrepresentation or fraud.” In the socio-political context of Uttarakhand where Hindutva groups are known to repeatedly make such false allegations about interfaith couples, the provision is likely to lead to dangerous consequences, especially without any guidelines on how the registrar can come to such a conclusion.
These provisions, too, have already begun impacting the lives of Uttarakhand’s interfaith couples despite the law not yet being in force. Abida is a 24-year-old research assistant at a premier Indian college, who moved to a village in Uttarakhand’s Almora district for work, where she met her boyfriend Raghav in 2023. Soon after, they rented out a house together and moved in together. Now with the UCC, Abida and Raghav’s live-in relationship will be criminalised if they fail to submit a statement to the registrar.
“It is a legitimate fear among us,” Abida said. “We chose to live together to see how our relationship grows. My family is a conservative Muslim family and I can’t even think of telling them that I’m in a relationship with a Hindu man. But I think my boyfriend’s family won’t have much of an issue because there are a few interfaith marriages in his family already. Beyond this, I’m not even thinking of getting married anytime soon as I’m applying to study abroad. The fact that we’ll have to register our relationship and that it has the possibility of reaching our parents is scary.”
However, Abida does not fear the impact of Hindutva outfits because she has seen that the Hindu community where she lives with her boyfriend is very accepting of her, even though their religious biases still persist. “They believe that after I marry him, I’ll finally become a pahadi”—a member of the hill communities—“even though I was born in Nainital and lived all my life in Uttarakhand, they don’t consider me as one. I’ll be an outsider until I marry a Hindu man from the mountains.” Eventually, Abida and Raghav decided that they would move to separate homes if someone files a complaint against them once the UCC is operational.
The UCC rules state that if the registrar “comes to know” of a live-in relationship that has not been registered, the registrar can issue a notice upon the couple to submit the necessary documents. It is not established how a registrar may come to know, but in effect, this creates the legal mechanism for Hindutva outfits to surveil and intimidate interfaith couples. In cases where couples fail to register their live-in relation, they may face imprisonment up to three months and a fine of up to Rs 10,000.
In fact, the Uttarakhand High Court and a state counsel have even mistakenly invoked the provisions regarding the registration of live-in relationships under the UCC before its implementation. In July 2024, when a 26-year-old Hindu woman and a 21-year-old Muslim man approached the court for protection from the woman’s family, the government counsel submitted that live-in partners must register their relationship before the registrar. A two-judge bench accordingly passed an order providing police protection contingent on the couple registering their live-in relationship within two days. It was only ten days later that the bench recalled the order, noting that the UCC had not come into force yet.
The law not only undermines the autonomy and agency of adults in consensual live-in relationships, and gives the state the power to morally police them, but also overrides their privacy by informing their parents. The current wave of religious polarisation in the state renders interfaith couples vulnerable to being identified and harassed by Hindutva hooligans, as was the case for Sunaina and Afraaz. The Code can normalise the invasion of privacy by the state to penalise couples unwilling to register their live-in relationships. Moreover, even the couples willing to conduct these legal measures to seek lawful protection for their relationship might face extrajudicial obstacles from district officials and Hindutva organisations.
The SMA’s inability to counter love jihad propaganda
Even in cases where the UCC is not invoked, the Special Marriage Act itself has been proven ineffectual in the state, and turned into a tool for surveilling interfaith couples. Sushma and Arshad, both from Uttarakhand, had to migrate to Bhubaneswar in Odisha to get married because of the harassment and violence they faced. In December 2020, moments after the duo went to submit their application to register their marriage under the SMA, village leaders and local Bajrang Dal members stormed into Sushma’s house and threatened her family to stop the marriage.
“After we applied, our advocate asked us to come to the SDM office,” Sushma recounted the ordeal. “The SDM wasn’t there, but his PA was present, so we met him. He asked me numerous personal questions about our relationship, work, family, consent etc. While I was answering the questions, Arshad noticed that someone in the office was trying to take our video. At the end of the meeting, they said that they will call us again in a month for final formalities. In a matter of 15 minutes, after we had left his office, I received a message from my sister asking me whether I had gone to the court to register my marriage.”
While both their families knew about their 11-year-long relationship, on the day they went to the SDM’s office, Sushma had not informed her family. So when the village representatives burst into her house, the family grew very scared. When Sushma got home, she met them and conceded to the demand that she would not marry a Muslim.
“They forced me to tell them his name so that they could ‘discipline’ him but I held back,” Sushma said. “After that, we just stayed silent and waited for an opportunity. Neither did we get a call back from the court nor did we go back. If we asked anyone around, they would just say ‘The situation here is really bad’—and maybe it is how they say it is.”
Arshad moved to Bhubaneswar in 2019 to look for better opportunities but after the incident with their marriage in Uttarakhand, Sushma decided to follow suit. “We wanted to assess the situation here and see how the government here reacts to interfaith couples of those belonging to Hindu-Muslim religions,” Sushma said. The couple got married last February in Bhubaneswar with the help of a non-profit organisation that helps interfaith couples fight societal challenges, called Dhanak for Humanity.
Asif Iqbal, the founder of Dhanak for Humanity, has been assisting interfaith couples seeking to register their marriages legally without resorting to conversion. He says that he hasbeen seeing a pattern in Uttarakhand where interfaith marriages that are allowed by the constitution have become a challenge for couples. “If the religious extremists are truly concerned about conversion for the sake of marriage, then we also believe in the same as such marriages aren’t based on the principles of gender equality,” Iqbal said. “But then at least make the provisions for civil marriage easier where the couples aren’t given a month’s notice and their identities aren’t leaked by way of public circulars and ensure that such extremists don’t interfere.”
One of the local right-wing forces actively campaigning against interfaith relationships between Hindu women and Muslim men is Devbhoomi Raksha Abhiyan. Its founder, Darshan Bharti, claimed that the organisation has been working to stop such relationships in Uttarakhand for over eight years. “Now people have got a little aware about love jihad, so when any cases of such interfaith couples come to register their marriage in court, we find out and act against it,” Bharti told me. “We find out about it through the court notice that the registrar’s office puts out and then we reach out to the girl’s family and talk them out of consenting to such relationships.”
Love jihad is a conspiracy theory peddled by right-wing organisations, accusing Muslim men of luring Hindu women under the pretext of love to convert them to Islam. The allegations have gained immense prominence in the last decade in Uttarakhand. The BJP government in power has much to contribute to this phenomenon as the chief minister Dhami and other senior members of the BJP have consistently engaged in fearmongering about it in public meetings, legitimising it without sharing any data in support.
Chandrakala spoke of the increasing hurdles to interfaith relationships in recent years. “It’s not like interfaith marriages were ever easy due to familial pressure but they weren’t made out to be a communal issue, as it is now being projected as love jihad,” she said. “Uttarakhand is now being presented as Devbhoomi”—as a Hindu holy land—“by the right-wing forces promoting Hindutva radicalisation, resulting in an increase in extremism in the Muslim communities as well. This increasing Hindutva radicalisation has also led to communal conspiracies in Purola and Dharchula towns where the Muslim communities have suffered extensively. The right-wing organisations along with senior BJP politicians consistently run campaigns against love jihad and influence locals to act against Muslims in the region.”
As recently as October 2024, Dhami said in a meeting in Dehradun, “The world sees Devbhoomi as a spiritual and religious place, and rising cases of land, love, and spit jihad will be dealt with strongly. The government has instructed the administration to thoroughly investigate these issues and ensure strict measures are taken against those responsible.”
In fact, the love jihad rhetoric has not led to consequences for interfaith couples alone—it has even led to the harassment of lawyers assisting them. In June 2024, members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal attacked the house of a Muslim advocate, Raisuddin Siddique, in Herbertpur, a town around 34 kilometres away from Dehradun. Siddique had been practising in Dehradun for over three decades, and was known to have worked on a lot of cases under the SMA. Yet, he maintains that he has only gotten one interfaith marriage registered back in the early 2000s, and denies any involvement in the interfaith registration he is accused of enabling.
In fact, the Hindu woman in the case, Kashish, had even released a video stating that she wilfully ran away from her house to marry Amjad, and that Siddique has nothing to do with it. But the rumour of ‘love jihad’ spread like wildfire, prompting the local VHP and Bajrang Dal members to attack Siddique. The advocate’s career is now in jeopardy due to his religious identity. “I’m a secular person,” he said. “I’ve lived with dignity here in Dehradun all my life. I’ve been seeing a growing discord between Hindus and Muslims for the past few years but I never had anything to do with it. I never joined any political party or even the Muslim religious groups here because they are conservative and I’m not. I never thought a day would come when I’d be framed for having a Muslim identity.”
Right to Information queries revealed that the recent years marked by the state’s fearmongering about love jihad has coincided with few cases of marriages registered under the SMA. The RTI applications revealed that in Dehradun, between 2018-2024, only 46 marriages were registered under the SMA, out of which 41 were registered in Sadar sub-district and five in Doiwala. There are a total of seven sub-districts in Dehradun, and the rest either refused to share data or dismissed the RTI appeal.
I filed similar RTIs in four other districts: Nainital, Almora, Haridwar and Uttarkashi. Despite repeated appeals, Haridwar responded stating, “Information not available.” One of Nainital’s eight sub-districts Kaladhungi shared that just four marriages were solemnised under the SMA between 2021 and 2024. Uttarkashi reported 22 cases between 2018-2024, with the sub-district Budkot documenting zero marriages in 2018, one each in 2019 and 2020 and zero again between 2021-2024. Dunda sub-district also reported zero marriages registered under the SMA between 2021-2024, and in Purola, 18 couples registered their marriages under the SMA in the same period. Almora shared detailed data, recording 47 registrations under the SMA between 2018-2024, with just one Hindu-Muslim couple each in 2018 and 2019, zero in 2020, one in 2021, zero again in 2022 and 2023 and one in 2024—making a grand total of five Hindu-Muslim marriages in six years.
In the RTI applications, I sought information from 2018 onwards due to a significant development that occurred that year—the enactment of the Uttarakhand Freedom of Religion Act of 2018, the state’s first anti-conversion law.
The added bane of an anti-conversion law
Within a year of the BJP coming to power in Uttarakhand, the state government brought in the anti-conversion law. Similar to numerous other legislations enacted in recent years by BJP-ruled states, the law prohibits any person from converting any other person from one religion to another by misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement, any fraudulent means or marriage. In 2022, the state government amended the law to make it even more stringent, classifying religious conversion as a non-bailable and cognizable offence, and increasing the term of imprisonment to up to ten years with a fine of up to Rs 5 lakh.
Pertinently, the clause prohibiting conversion for marriage does not include any additional qualifications, such as requiring the marriage or conversion to be through coercion, force or any such requirement. As such, consenting adults who choose to convert their religion out of their own free will may still face challenges under the law. The law also prohibits marriages “for the sole purpose of conversion,” with no guidance on what constitutes or how to determine a “sole purpose.” These shortcomings are ostensibly addressed in the clause mandating any individual choosing to convert their religion to submit a declaration to a district magistrate one month in advance, who is in turn mandated to initiate a police enquiry into the “real intention, purpose and cause of that proposed religion conversion.”
Moving past the strict requirements of the law, and how it can be used to harass and prevent any interfaith couples where one partner wishes to convert their religion, it is worth highlighting that on paper, it places no obligations or restrictions on secular, interfaith marriages under the SMA. Yet, in practice, the anti-conversion law poses yet another legal obstacle for interfaith couples seeking to register their marriage, even if neither of them seeks to convert.
Dinesh Joshi, Sunaina’s uncle, claimed that in the last few years, even interfaith couples of legal age, who sought to marry with their parent’s consent, had to file a mandatory anti-conversion affidavit along with other documents stating that they would not convert their religion. This rule has not been mandated under the SMA or the anti-conversion law, but according to Joshi, it has become a compulsory part of the marriage registration process in Uttarakhand.
Razia Beig, a Dehradun-based advocate, confirmed that even in SMA cases of interfaith marriages where the couple does not want to convert to a different faith, they have to file individual affidavits stating the same. “All this is being done especially so Hindu women don’t convert to Islam,” Beig said. “In cases where there is a Muslim woman and a Hindu man, it doesn’t become such a big issue for the authorities and such marriages are registered without any hassle from the RSS or Bajrang Dal.” Joshi, who had been working in the civil court for over four decades, added that this rule had only come into the process since the uproar around ‘love jihad’ gained momentum in Uttarakhand and that the emergence of UCC “put a full stop to such marriages altogether.”
An analysis of over 50 cases involving the anti-conversion law before the Uttarakhand High Court showed that in most instances, interfaith couples approached the court to seek police protection from their family. In cases where one of the partners did convert to their partner’s religion to get married, the couple usually did not follow the procedure under the anti-conversion law, and get married under religious personal laws.
Iqbal, of Dhanak for Humanity, said such couples usually leave their houses in a state of urgency, often because the woman’s parents are forcing her to get married to someone else or because she is under forceful confinement. “In such cases, the couples run away and immediately find a Hindu priest or a Maulana to solemnise their marriage as an instant solution,” he added. “They feel that once they are married, they can always negotiate with their families and police. Earlier, the police would also agree to such cases because there was no law against such marriages. But now that there is an anti-conversion law that specifically targets such marriages, the police have also stopped considering religious marriages legal and the families also act against interfaith couples despite their religious marriage.”
As observed by Iqbal, the case analysis also suggested that it was only after the parents or brothers harassed the couple despite their marriage that they were forced to seek police protection from the court. In a few cases, Hindutva outfits filed complaints against the couples, and in some rare cases, the parents filed a complaint against their daughter for converting to her partner’s religion. Except for one case of a Hindu-Christian marriage, all other cases were of Hindu-Muslim relationships, where most of them solemnised their marriage through religious procedures. “The state formulated this anti-conversion law for the sole reason of capping religious marriages of interfaith couples, and now they have brought in further surveillance for live-in relationships,” Iqbal added.
The historian Charu Gupta has written of the Uttar Pradesh anti-conversion law that “it emerges from a consensus among Hindu groups that women cannot exercise any choice in love, sans familial and community approval.” She continues:
Anxieties over who is bedding and wedding Hindu women are embedded in a distinct Hindu nationalism, along with a simultaneous rewriting and redefining of morality and patriarchal norms. It buttresses Hindu male prowess and dominance and further demonises and marginalises the Muslim male. It strengthens the disciplining and infantilising of the Hindu woman and reinstates familial patriarchies. It sustains fabricated fears of declining Hindu numbers and reinforces imagined ‘threats’ of religious conversions. It is an issue, which unlike that of cow protection, papers over caste tensions and hierarchies and projects an abstract homogenous Hindu identity. The law signals all this and something more.
Anti-Muslim sentiments among state actors
It is not just the law that has become vulnerable to religious discrimination, but even those responsible for enforcing it. While registration officers delay marriages and inform Hindutva outfits of Hindu-Muslim couples, interfaith relationships face the additional challenge of a police attitude marked by religious hatred and bias.
In a WhatsApp group, created for information exchange, named, “UK 01 to 13 Uttarakhand Police,” the police officials sent hateful anti-Muslim messages targeting the community. These messages were reportedly sent on the same day when an enraged mob attacked Muslims and shops owned by them, following allegations that a young Muslim barber had harassed a woman in the Ghat area of Chamoli district in September last year. In the conversation, different police officials shared misinformation about love jihad, and one official wrote, “These Muslims shouldn’t get a place to live in the mountains.” While Chamoli’s police officials were using social media to appeal for peace and harmony against the hateful rumours spread by anti-social elements, communal hate-filled messages were simultaneously being shared in the WhatsApp group of police personnel.
Ajai Singh, the senior superintendent of police in Dehradun, and AP Anshuman, an additional director general of police who is responsible for the conduct of police personnel on social media, both claimed to not have any knowledge of the incident. Following the incident, Indresh Maikhuri, a social activist from Dehradun and a member of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) wrote to chief minister Dhami and the deputy general of police. “There has been an alarming increase in incidents of communal frenzy in Uttarakhand,” reads the letter. “Strict legal action should be taken against the police personnel who shared hateful messages in the said WhatsApp group.” Maikhuri said he is yet to receive a response from the CM or the DGP. Given the widespread nature of the anti-Muslim sentiment among state officials, it is unsurprising that interfaith couples live in fear without any assurance of support or protection.
The ongoing suppression of interfaith marriages in Uttarakhand highlights the intersection of state-sponsored legal frameworks, societal prejudice, and the aggressive actions of Hindutva groups, creating a hostile environment for constitutional freedoms. Despite the SMA’s provision for consenting adults to marry across religious boundaries, state actors, emboldened by extremist narratives, are actively undermining these rights through procedural delays, intimidation, and misinformation. The introduction of the Uniform Civil Code further exacerbates this issue by providing an opaque legal system vulnerable to communal bias.
Despite a fear that continues to hover over them, Sunaina and Afraaz overcame all the obstacles and got married. Last November, they had a wedding reception where their families got together to celebrate their union. “Until the reception, we stayed in our own homes because we didn’t get married in front of our families and relatives so we decided to have a reception to get their blessings,” Sunaina said. “Once we had the function and all our family joined us in our joy, we then moved in together and now work together as well. I’m certain that if anyone raises a finger at us, we can show our marriage certificate and silence them.”
c. The Polis Project