Over the last three years, there have been reports, primarily from
Kerala as well as from some other states, notably Telangana and Andhra,
about what was appropriately titled by newspapers as ‘Love Jihad’.
Pseudo-secularists dismissed these reports as a part of the Hindutva
propaganda.
Now the truth has rushed like the monsoon rains in
Kerala in the wake of many middle class mothers knocking at the Marxist
Chief Minister’s door asking for help to track down several young women
who have disappeared after marrying young Muslims and then being
converted to Islam. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has told the crying
mothers he would order an enquiry.
Take, for instance, the story
of Bindu, the mother of a girl in north Kerala. The daughter was lured
by a young man, an MBA, who himself was a convert to Islam from
Christianity. The daughter was in regular contact with the mother
throughout her study time and then there was silence.
The worried
mother approached the police after finding no response from her
daughter. The police officer advised her to approach the High Court with
a habeas corpus plea. The court got the police to produce the girl in
the High Court and the mother was shocked to find that her daughter was
in full veil.
She had got married and converted to Islam. After a
few months, Bindu was told that her daughter was pregnant but the
communication was irregular. Suddenly, the daughter phoned her mother to
tell her that she was in Sri Lanka for a few days and would return. The
next thing was a call from Afghanistan and then, long silence. It was
then that Bindu approached the Chief Minister.
The suspicion that
this girl has gone over with her husband to Syria to join the Islamic
State is strong. Now have come several other similar stories from across
Kerala, mostly from the Malappuram Muslim majority district and nearby
Kozhikode port city, a Muslim stronghold. The police say 17 to 20
people from Kerala have gone over to Syria leaving no traces whatever.
A
local TV channel showed considerable enterprise in tracking at least
five families, with a similar story like that of Bindu. It found the
worried parents were clueless on their college-going daughters. It found
a school teacher Rashid was the main recruiter for the Islamic State.
He was plotting all along for the last four years or so to brainwash his neighbours and others into joining Islamist militancy.
In
all the Kerala cases, of flight to join the barbaric killings, sex
slavery, wholesale massacre that is going on in Syria-Iraq and the
IS-planned isolated attacks in Europe, US and elsewhere, the plot was
found to be virtually same or similar — lure innocent girls into
marrying trained Islamist youngmen and then brainwash them to convert to
Islam.
The concern in the state over the rapid spread of radical
Islam has been so intense that last Monday, the Kerala Assembly spent an
entire day on this problem and Malayali youngsters being lured into and
recruited systematically for terror organisations.
The top
leaders of the two fronts accused each other for this alarming growth of
radicalisation. The Congress-led UDF, now in opposition, quoted
instances after instances of the Marxist leader and now Chief Minister
Mr Vijayan partnering with radical Islamist organisations like the PDP
and SDIP in the previous elections.
The Chief Minister’s counter
that the days of such electoral collaboration no longer existed, itself
exposed the fact that the tie-up existed till the other day. The Muslim
League has done nothing to dismantle such dangerous movements within the
community it claims to speak for, notwithstanding the public
denunciation of terror and the radicals claiming to speak for Islam. In
fact, there are reports of IS recruits in Kerala and ultra
fundamentalists imposing loyalty oaths on young Muslims — loyalty to IS
chief al-Baghdadi, the self-styled Caliph of Islam.
The two
political fronts of Kerala joining together in the Kerala Assembly to
unanimously condemn terror can only be considered as a paper commitment
when the Marxist Government, just as its predecessor, the Congress-led
front, takes no concrete steps to thwart the radicalisation of Muslims
and open preaching of and recruiting for the IS.
Among the
political and cultural forces in Kerala with its great names in every
aspect of national culture, only the RSS and BJP have come forward to
oppose this radical march and pay the price for it in terms of sacrifice
of its cadres at the hands of radicals, both political and religious.
The
social media, all operated from outside the country, spreads communal
poison using morphed photos, old photos of events long past and posted
to look like current events, to engender alienation within the community
against the secular ideal.
All this continues to be fearlessly
followed because the perpetrators realise they can count on the Muslim
appeasement of the two political fronts to block any step to end these
anti-national moves.
So, many mothers like Bindu would wait for
more years to hear from their daughters lured to marry for the killing
fields of the Levant like so many baits. More likely, they will never
hear from them at all.
By Balbir Punj, a former BJP MP and a Delhi-based commentator on social and political issues
Email: punjbalbir@gmail.com
Courtesy: The New Indian Express
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