“I had read about ‘love jihad’ and Hindutva organisations,” Hasnain Ansari said. “But I never expected all this to happen to us and that it would be this bad.”
In January, Ankita Rathore’s and Hasnain Ansari’s application under the Special Marriage Act was rejected by a marriage registrar in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. This was after a vicious smear campaign by the Hindi media, which branded their relationship as a case of “love jihad”, violent threats from Rathore’s family and intimidation by Hindutva groups.
Love jihad refers to the Hindutva conspiracy theory that Muslim men are conspiring to marry Hindu women merely so that they can force them to convert to Islam.
Rather than uphold the right of two adults to get married, the justice system has also ended up victimising the couple. Their decision to get married was broadcast to the world by the public notice provision of the Special Marriage Act. And then, ostensibly as part of the “police protection” to keep them safe from angry relatives and Hindutva groups, Rathore was confined to a children’s shelter home. Ansari, in turn, was kept in a police barrack. They were denied access to their phones and confined to a room.
“We felt like we were in police custody, not police protection,” Ansari said.
Rathore and Ansari’s five-months legal struggle to get married in the face of these hostilities is a cautionary tale of how the entire state apparatus is now bent on preventing interfaith couples – especially those where the man is Muslim and the woman Hindu – from getting married.
Despite this, Ankita and Hasnain have refused to back down.
Falling in love
Rathore and Ansari met in Indore in 2020, when they were both working for the tech giant, Amazon. They soon began dating. Rathore has an MBA degree and was working in the company’s fraud research team. Ansari, who has a bachelor’s degree in engineering, was with the company’s HR team.
They moved to Bhopal and began living together in April 2023. At the time, Rathore was 26 and Ansari 28.
Both were clear that they wanted to marry. Ansari said that it took him nearly a year to persuade his family to make peace with his decision. “I was clear from the beginning with them that Ankita would not change her religion and that no one in my family would give her any trouble over her religion,” he told Scroll over the phone.
Rathore was afraid of the disapproval and resistance she would face from her parents. But nothing could have prepared her for their reaction, when she finally told them about her decision to marry Ansari in October 2023. “They immediately took me out to a dark and desolate street and threatened that if I don’t stop seeing Hasnain, they would frame Hasnain for rape and love jihad,” Rathore recalled. “They said that they would slit my throat and force me to give testimony against him.”
Her parents then called up Ansari and abused and threatened him, she said.
Rathore’s parents had known Ansari as her friend and met him several times at their house in Indore. “They would invite him whenever they would know Hasnain is in Indore,” Ankita Rathore said. “He even spent Diwali with us once.”
Rathore said that her parents would even joke that if Ansari were Hindu, he would make the perfect groom for her.
Legal struggle
In spite of this, Rathore and Ansari decided to go ahead with the registration of their marriage.
In September, both moved from Bhopal to Jabalpur and filed a writ petition in the Madhya Pradesh High Court for police protection. On October 4, the High Court asked for the Jabalpur police to keep them safe and protect them from any false first information reports against them.
They then applied for marriage under the Special Marriage Act on October 7. The act allows persons from any religion to marry without either of them having to give up their faith.
However, the Special Marriage Act requires a couple to give a 30-day notice before their marriage. This notice is put up in the office of the marriage registrar for public viewing, to invite objections, if any, to the marriage. This contains personal details of the couple: their names, addresses, age, occupation and photos.
This feature of the Special Marriage Act was the start of their nightmare.
On October 15, Rathore’s family received a letter informing them of the marriage application. They again called Rathore and threatened to kill Ansari and harm her.
After that, both Rathore and Ansari claim, their photos began going viral on social media. Hindutva organisations began spreading misinformation that Ansari had kidnapped Rathore and that this was a case of so-called love jihad. This, in turn, was taken up by Hindi news outlets, which spread misinformation that Rathore and Ansari’s relationship was a case of so-called love jihad.
Soon after, Rathore alleged, her family reported to the police that she had gone missing.
Ansari said that local BJP leaders and Hindutva organisation members gheraoed his family’s house in Sihora, a town in Jabalpur district. They called up and threatened his father and his uncle. His family had to flee their home.
“There was a bandh declared in Sihora for two days by local BJP leaders,” he alleged. “They chanted against me and burnt my effigies.”
The issue went national. On October 21, T Raja, BJP MLA from Telangana, requested the Madhya Pradesh chief minister to intervene in the matter and stop their marriage. He also called upon Hindutva organisations in Jabalpur to stop the registration of their marriage.
Rathore and Ansari were told by their lawyer, Amanulla Usmani, to come to the High Court on October 22 to sign an affidavit that Rathore had not been kidnapped by Ansari and that she was willingly marrying him. When they reached court, they found Rathore’s family and members of several Hindutva organisations waiting.
After this, Usmani told the court that he could not proceed with the case due to threats to his life.
In a hearing that day, Justice Vishal Dhagat of the High Court ordered that both Rathore and Ansari be kept under police protection at separate locations. During this time, Ansari or his family members were not to contact Rathore. “During such time, she is free to think about her decision to marry [Ansari],” the order said.
He directed that Rathore would be presented before a marriage registrar on November 12 to ascertain that she was entering into this marriage of her own free will.
In spite of the protection order, Rathore said that her family members abused and harassed her in front of the police in court premises for 30 minutes. “My mother even tried to force feed me something,” she said. She alleged that her mother was attempting to drug her in order to falsely implicate Ansari.
The police took away their cell phones and formatted them, Rathore and Ansari alleged, in spite of there being no such direction by the court.
The protection order said that “[w]hen circumstances are conducive, [Ansari] will be taken to his home and left in company of family members and relatives.” Ansari told Scroll, “In court, the police initially said that they would keep me in jail but Justice Dhagat refused, saying that I am not a criminal.”
However, the court’s protection order turned out to be a pretext for the police to de facto imprison the couple. Over the next few months, Rathore and Ansari were treated virtually like criminals. Ansari alleged that he was kept by the police at a police barrack till February 24. Rathore is still confined to the shelter home.
‘Muslims are bad’
The next few months under so-called police protection were extremely difficult for both Rathore and Ansari. With their movement and communication cut off, they had no way to speak with each other or anyone outside.
Meanwhile, Rathore’s father lodged an appeal against the protection order in the High Court. On November 9, the court stayed, for two weeks, the order that required Rathore to be taken to the marriage registrar on November 12. Rathore said that she came to know of this only from the newspapers the next day.
Meanwhile, the police kept feeding them false information to crush their spirit, they alleged. Ansari said that the police would tell him that Rathore had turned against him and would be giving testimony against him. He could not speak to Rathore to confirm these allegations given the high court’s bar on communicating with her. “It was extremely traumatising,” he said. “I would begin crying and even contemplate suicide.”
Rathore said she would be told by police officers about so-called love jihad cases, about how “Muslims are bad”. She was also emotionally tortured with claims that her mother was ill and that she should think about her rather than her partner.
“I felt so much stress, anxiety and tension,” she said. “I could not eat anything. I would vomit frequently.”
In Sihora, Ansari’s family was finding it difficult to hire a new lawyer for them. “No one was ready to take our case because of threats from Hindutva organisations,” Ansari alleged.
Finally, advocate Jwalant Singh Chouhan, a 35-year old Indore-based lawyer, took up their case.
‘Darkness enveloped everything’
On December 18, a two-judge bench of the High Court led by Chief Justice Suresh Kumar Kait directed state authorities to “facilitate” the appearance of the couple before the marriage registrar for registering their marriage. It also ordered the continuance of their police protection for at least one more month and for it to continue “till threat perception continues”.
They were summoned to the marriage registrar’s office on January 27. However, both of them were brought by the police to the registrar’s office only at 5 pm. Meanwhile, Ansari alleged, the registrar, Nathuram Gaur, had already rejected their application and left his office.
The rejection was ostensibly due to non-fulfillment of the residency requirement under the Special Marriage Act. Under the law, the applicant must have resided at their address for the preceding 30 days. The order claimed that Ansari had not resided at his claimed address in Sihora for the last ten years.
Ironically, this non-fulfillment was due to the police: Ansari had been forced to stay at a police barrack in Jabalpur since October 22, even though the High Court had directed that he stay at the location till “circumstances are conducive”. Ansari also claimed that the assertion in the order that he had not lived in Sihora at all in the previous ten years was false. “The patwari who had come to my home to inquire forced my father to sign some papers claiming that I had not lived at my family house in the last ten years,” he said.
After months of imprisonment, threats and intimidation, the rejection was a body blow. “That day, it felt like darkness had enveloped everything,” Rathore said. “The thing that we had been fighting for and looking forward to for so long, we were cheated out of it. We were back to square one.”
Hope endures
In spite of this setback, Rathore and Ansari decided to continue their legal struggle.
Chouhan filed another writ petition on their behalf in the High Court requesting for their marriage to be registered, considering that they had been residing in Jabalpur under police protection since October 22. This meant that they fulfilled the residency requirement under the Special Marriage Act.
On Monday, the High Court issued notice in the petition and listed the matter to be heard next week.
Chouhan is confident of his clients being able to register their marriage application this time. He pointed out that in a hearing of the petition on Monday, Justice Vivek Agarwal had criticised the marriage registrar’s order, asking, “Is he a politician?” In his order, Agarwal said that marriage registrar’s order “appears to be a public statement rather than a decision on merits”. However, he refused to allow Rathore to reside with Ansari in the interim.
‘Joke with the Constitution’
Their cell phones were restored to them on February 24, after more than four months. While Ansari is not in the police barrack anymore, Rathore is still at the shelter home. But now they can at least communicate with each other: between October 22 and February 24, their communication was restricted to two brief encounters: at the High Court in December and at the marriage registrar’s office in January.
Despite the emotional and financial toll of their ordeal, neither of them considered giving up on their relationship. “We have been imprisoned and punished without any crime,” she said. “But the rest of our life together will be happy.”
“This has been an extremely hard time,” Ansari said. “It was as if everyone wanted us to give up and stop our marriage.”
He said that in the High Court, the judges had spoken nicely to him. “They had warned me that things will not go easily now that extremists were involved,” he said. “But we didn’t expect this to turn into what we have faced the last few months. No one should be treated so poorly.”
Ansari said that once they get married, they will move out of Madhya Pradesh. “After all that we have gone through, we don’t want to stay here,” he said.
“They have played a joke with the Constitution,” he said. “If they are not willing to listen to judges of a High Court, who will they listen to?”
