Sexuality is a contested terrain in every society with varying degrees. In India, the narrative of love or sexual jihad has become an important rallying point for the adherents of Hindutva (the political ideology espoused by the Bhartiya Janata Party, currently in power in India) to curb what they believe is a cultural war waged by Muslim men to sexually lure and marry Hindu women as part of their religious duty to convert them. Love jihad narratives have exploded on X or Twitter in the recent past, followed by offline instances of violence against inter-religious couples, pointing to a definitive and progressive loss of personal liberty under the current right-wing regime amidst an unsubstantiated fear of a ‘demographic takeover’ by Muslims.
Other inclinations that have accompanied this right wing narrative include increasing moral policing, containment and erasure of transgressive love, the control of female sexuality and the crippling criminalization of Muslim men. While all these issues have found some resonance in recent scholarships around the topic, this project departs from these tropes to explore the pedagogical impulses engendered in these narratives. Using digital ethnography and Twitter API, this project will adopt a novel lens of reforms (of the Hindu society) as a strong motivation engendered in the love jihad narrative that is sidelined by extreme speech. In doing so it argues that as a process, the foundations of these reformist narratives ca be traced to colonial India.