Since the CCTV video of the cold-hearted murder of Nikita Tomar has been going viral online, I have been trying to find out where, when and why the practice of Love-Jihad was born. While researching for this article I learned that forced conversions are forbidden in Islam (I had to triple-check this myself) then why were Tauseef and his family hounding Nikita Tomar to convert and marry him? Why did he abduct her to forcibly convert her religion and make her marry him?

But here I want to discuss with you a matter that is vital and concurrent for India and the whole world as an increasingly interconnected society. We are observing a massive outrage globally since the terrorist attacks in France and while India has been a victim to such manslaughter for a very long time now, there was not this much aggression ever before in the global community.

This chronology of events carries a lesson in itself:

If we want people to hear our voices, we have to speak loudly, just like the French people did. We need to bring to light the prevailing trend of forced conversions that daughters of Hindus, Sikhs and Christians are being violated with in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and elsewhere. There have been numerous instances where a Muslim man attempted to pressurize a non-Muslim woman into converting to Islam and marrying him. It is overwhelming to even quote the incidents from the rape and murder of Harshita Sharma by Zubair Khan in 2017 the very fresh case of Nikita Tomar who was shot in the head by Tauseef on a busy street in broad daylight. One is compelled to believe that these boys are given complete moral, financial and ideological support by the very system of Islamic education and family structure. At this point the reader must note that Tauseef’s mother was threatening Nikita over calls to marry her son and in fact she even went on to state that if Nikita had bowed down to her son’s coercion, he would not have had to kill her.

If we are to trust the patterns of growth of Islamic terrorism and orthodoxism sponsored by Pakistan along with Muslims living in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh- countries with previously negligible Muslim majority areas, this poison would only spread to other regions of the world. More Hindu, Christian and Sikh women would be fooled by Muslim men masquerading as benevolent harmless lover-boys crazy over a non-Muslim woman, until one day when the woman finds out their true identity and is then forced into converting the religion that she was born into, joining the Muslim man’s harem and becoming one of his several “wives”, bearing a dozen of his children and then dying while giving birth to his umpteenth baby. Not to forget that there can always be a sprinkling of Triple Talaaq and Halala and such other shenanigans.

According to merriam-webster.com and most other online dictionaries, “Jihad” refers to a holy war that is sanctioned by the Islamic laws and written down in the Quran or the Hadith. There are three types of struggle or Jihad that a devout Muslim can adopt: battle against Satan, battle against an open enemy, and lastly battle against one’s own internal vices. But there is nothing “holy” about the barbaric murder of Nikita Tomar. She was killed by an Islamist extremist who has been brainwashed by the inherently corrupt Islamic clerics and preachers willing to resort to any and every gruesome method to fulfill their ulterior motives.

As per the universally accepted rules, a new word is qualified to enter a dictionary if it fulfills three criteria: it is used frequently, it is used by a large number of people and it has a well-defined, popularly assigned meaning attached to it. With an exponential increase in the number of cases of love jihad, the word has become sufficiently common, frequently used and meaningful too, so why not lobby for adding it to the various dictionaries? We need a strong ideological base if we want to take this struggle for protecting our mothers, sisters and daughters seriously. If we do not stand up together in solidarity today then many more Nikita Tomars would be slaughtered. What would we do if, god forbid, they be from our friends or family?

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