The term apologetics derives from the Ancient Greek word apologia (ἀπολογία). In the Classical Greek legal system, the prosecution delivered the kategoria (κατηγορία), the accusation or charge, and the defendant replied with an apologia, the defence. The apologia was a formal speech or explanation to reply to and rebut the charges. A famous example is Socrates' Apologia defense, as chronicled in Plato's Apology.
Although the term apologetics has Western, primarily
Christian origins and is most frequently associated with the defense of
Christianity, the term is sometimes used referring to the defense of any
religion in formal debate involving religion.
Many apologetic books have been written in defence of the history or teachings of the Baháʼí Faith. The religion's founders wrote several books presenting proofs of their religion; among them are the Báb's Seven Proofs and Bahá'u'lláh's Kitáb-i-Íqán. Later Baháʼí authors wrote prominent apologetic texts, such as Mírzá Abu'l-Fadl's The Brilliant Proof and Udo Schaefer et al.'s Making the Crooked Straight.
Buddhism
One of the earliest Buddhist apologetic texts is The Questions of King Milinda, which deals with the Buddhist metaphysics such as the "no-self" nature of the individual and characteristics such as wisdom, perception, volition, feeling, consciousness and the soul. In the Meiji Era (1868-1912), encounters between Buddhists and Christians in Japan as a result of increasing contact between Japan and other nations may have prompted the formation of Japanese New Buddhism, including the apologetic Shin Bukkyō (新仏教) magazine. In recent times, A. L. De Silva, an Australian convert to Buddhism, has written a book, Beyond Belief, providing Buddhist apologetic responses and a critique of Christian Fundamentalist doctrine. Gunapala Dharmasiri wrote an apologetic critique of the Christian concept of God from a Theravadin Buddhist perspective.
Christian apologetics combines Christian theology, natural theology, and philosophy
in an attempt to present a rational basis for the Christian faith, to
defend the faith against objections and misrepresentation, and to show
that the Christian doctrine is the only world-view that is faultless and
consistent with all fundamental knowledge and questions.
Christian apologetics has taken many forms over the centuries. In the Roman Empire,
Christians were severely persecuted, and many charges were brought
against them. Examples in the Bible include the Apostle Paul's address
to the Athenians in the Areopagus (Acts 17: 22-34). J. David Cassel gives several examples: Tacitus wrote that Nero fabricated charges that Christians started the burning of Rome. Other charges included cannibalism (due to a literal interpretation of the Eucharist) and incest (due to early Christians' practice of addressing each other as "brother" and "sister"). Paul the Apostle, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and others often defended Christianity against charges that were brought to justify persecution.
John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was an English convert to Roman Catholicism, later made a cardinal, and beatified in 2010. In early life he was a major figure in the Oxford Movement to bring the Church of England
back to its Catholic roots. Eventually his studies in history
persuaded him to become a Roman Catholic. When John Henry Newman
entitled his spiritual autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua','
in 1864, he was playing upon both this connotation, and the more
commonly understood meaning of an expression of contrition or regret.
Deism is a form of theism
in which God created the universe and established rationally
comprehensible moral and natural laws but no longer intervenes in human
affairs. Deism is a natural religion
where belief in God is based on application of reason and evidence
observed in the designs and laws found in nature. The World Order of
Deists maintains a web site presenting deist apologetics that
demonstrate the existence of God based on evidence and reason, absent
divine revelation.
Hinduism
Hindu
apologetics began developing during the British colonial period. A
number of Indian intellectuals had become critical of the British
tendency to devalue the Hindu religious tradition. As a result, these
Indian intellectuals, as well as a handful of British Indologists,
were galvanized to examine the roots of the religion as well as to
study its vast arcana and corpus in an analytical fashion. This endeavor
drove the deciphering and preservation of Sanskrit. Many translations of Hindu texts were produced which made them accessible to a broader reading audience.
In the early 18th century, Christian missionary Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg engaged in dialogues with several Tamil-speaking Malabarian
Hindu priests, and recorded arguments of these Hindu apologists. These
records include German-language reports submitted to the Lutheran
headquarters in Halle, and 99 letters written by the Hindu priests to him (later translated into German under the title Malabarische Korrespondenz from 1718 onwards).
During 1830–1831, missionary John Wilson engaged in debates with Hindu apologists in Bombay. In 1830, his protege Ram Chandra, a Hindu convert to Christianity, debated with several Hindu Brahmin apologists in public. Hindu panditMorobhatt Dandekar summarized his arguments from his 1831 debate with Wilson in a Marathi-language work titled Shri-Hindu-dharma-sthapana. Narayana Rao, another Hindu apologist, wrote Svadesha-dharma-abhimani in response to Wilson.
A range of Indian philosophers, including Swami Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghose, have written rational explanations regarding the values of the Hindu religious tradition. More modern proponents such as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi have also tried to correlate recent developments from quantum physics and consciousness research with Hindu concepts. The late Reverend Pandurang Shastri Athavale has given a plethora of discourses regarding the symbolism and rational basis for many principles in the Vedic tradition. In his book The Cradle of Civilization,
David Frawley, an American who has embraced the Vedic tradition, has
characterized the ancient texts of the Hindu heritage as being like
"pyramids of the spirit".
'Ilm al-Kalām, literally "science of discourse", usually foreshortened to kalam and sometimes called Islamic scholastic theology,
is an Islamic undertaking born out of the need to establish and defend
the tenets of Islamic faith against skeptics and detractors. A scholar of kalam is referred to as a mutakallim (plural mutakallimūn) as distinguished from philosophers, jurists, and scientists.
Jewish apologetic literature can be traced back as far as Aristobulus of Paneas, though some discern it in the works of Demetrius the chronographer
(3rd century BCE) traces of the style of "questions" and "solutions"
typical of the genre. Aristobulus was a Jewish philosopher of Alexandria and the author of an apologetic work addressed to Ptolemy VI Philometor. Josephus's Contra Apion is a wide-ranging defense of Judaism against many charges laid against Judaism at that time, as too are some of the works of Philo of Alexandria.
In response to modern Christian missionaries, and congregations
that "are designed to appear Jewish, but are actually fundamentalist
Christian churches, which use traditional Jewish symbols to lure the
most vulnerable of our Jewish people into their ranks", Jews for Judaism is the largest counter-missionary organization in existence, today. Kiruv Organization (Mizrachi), founded by Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi, and Outreach Judaism, founded by Rabbi Tovia Singer,
are other prominent international organizations that respond "directly
to the issues raised by missionaries and cults, by exploring Judaism in
contradistinction to fundamentalist Christianity."
Pantheism
Some pantheists have formed organizations such as the World Pantheist Movement and the Universal Pantheist Society to promote and defend the belief in pantheism.
Native Americans
In a famous speech called "Red Jacket on Religion for the White Man and the Red" in 1805, Seneca chief Red Jacket gave an apologetic for Native American religion.
In literature
Plato's Apology may be read as both a religious and literary apology; however, more specifically literary examples may be found in the prefaces and dedications, which proceed many Early Modern plays, novels, and poems. Eighteenth century authors such as Colley Cibber, Frances Burney, and William Congreve,
to name but a few, prefaced the majority of their poetic work with such
apologies. In addition to the desire to defend their work, the
apologetic preface often suggests the author's attempt to humble his- or
herself before the audience.
Love jihad (or Romeo jihad) is an Islamophobicconspiracy theory promoted by right-wing Hindutva activists. The conspiracy theory purports that Muslim men target Hindu women for conversion to Islam by means such as seduction, feigning love, deception, kidnapping, and marriage, as part of a broader demographic "war" by Muslims against India, and an organised international conspiracy, for domination through demographic growth and replacement.
The conspiracy theory relies on disinformation to conduct its hate campaign, and is noted for its similarities to other historic hate campaigns as well as contemporary white nationalist conspiracy theories and Euro-American Islamophobia. It features Orientalist portrayals of Muslims as barbaric and hypersexual, and carries the paternalistic and patriarchal
notions that Hindu women are passive and victimized, while "any
possibility of women exercising their legitimate right to love and their
right to choice is ignored". It has consequently been the cause of vigilante assaults, murders and other violent incidents, including the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots.
Created in 2009
as part of a campaign to foster fear and paranoia, the conspiracy
theory was disseminated by Hindutva publications, such as the Sanatan Prabhat and the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti
website, calling Hindus to protect their women from Muslim men who were
simultaneously depicted to be attractive seducers and lecherous
rapists. Organisations including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishva Hindu Parishad have since been credited for its proliferation in India and abroad, respectively. The conspiracy theory was noted to have become a significant belief in the state of Uttar Pradesh by 2014 and contributed to the success of the Bharatiya Janata Party campaign in the state.
The concept was institutionalised in India after the election of the Bharatiya Janata Party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Right-wing pro-government television media, such as Times Now and Republic TV, and social media disinformation campaigns are generally held responsible for the growth of its popularity.
Legislation against the purported conspiracy has been initiated in a
number of states ruled by the party and implemented in the state of
Uttar Pradesh by the Yogi Adityanath government, where it has been used as a means of state repression on Muslims and crackdown on interfaith marriages.
The
Indian subcontinent has been religiously pluralistic for centuries.
This map from 1909 shows Muslim regions in the northwest in green mixing
with Hindu regions stretching across most of the region into Buddhist
Burma.
In a piece picked up by the Chicago Tribune, Foreign Policy correspondent Siddhartha Mahanta reports that the modern Love Jihad conspiracy has roots in the 1947 partition of India.
This partition led to the creation of India and Pakistan. The creation
of two countries with different majority religions led to large-scale
migration, with millions of people moving between the countries and
rampant reports of sexual predation and forced conversions of women by
men of both faiths.
Women on both sides of the conflict were impacted, leading to "recovery
operations" by both the Indian and Pakistani governments of these
women, with over 20,000 Muslim and 9,000 non-Muslim women being
recovered between 1947 and 1956.
This tense history caused repeated clashes between the faiths in the
decades that followed as well, according to Mahanta, as cultural
pressure against interfaith marriage for either side.
As of 2011, Hindus were the leading religious majority in India,
at 80%, with Muslims at 14% an increase from 9% from 1951 while the
Hindu population of Pakistan has remained at 2% and that of Bangladesh
fallen to 8%. In the 1951 census, West Pakistan (now Pakistan) had 1.3% Hindu population, while East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) had 22.05%.
India has a long tradition of arranged marriages, wherein the bride and groom do not choose their partners. Through the 2000s and 2010s, India witnessed a rise in love marriages, although tensions continue around interfaith marriages, along with other traditionally discouraged unions.In 2012, The Hindu
reported that illegal intimidation against consenting couples engaging
in such discouraged unions, including inter-religious marriage, had
surged.
That year, Uttar Pradesh saw the proposal of an amendment to remove the
requirement to declare religion from the marriage law in hopes of
encouraging those who were hiding their interfaith marriage due to
social norms to register.
One of the tensions surrounding interfaith marriage relates to concerns of required, even forced, marital conversion. Marriage in Islam
is a legal contract with requirements around the religions of the
participants. While Muslim women are only permitted within the contract
to marry Muslim men, Muslim men may marry "People of the Book", interpreted by most to include Jews and Christians, with the inclusion of Hindus disputed. According to a 2014 article in the Mumbai Mirror, some non-Muslim brides in Muslim-Hindu marriages convert, while other couples choose a civil marriage under the Special Marriage Act of 1954.
Marriage between Muslim women and Hindu men (including Sikh, Jaina, and
Buddhist) is legal civil marriage under The Special Marriage Act of
1954.
Love jihad in politics has been closely tied to Hindu nationalism,
particularly the more extremist form hindutva associated with BJPPrime Minister of IndiaNarendra Modi. The anti-Islamic stances of many right wing hindutva groups like Vishva Hindu Parishad
(VHP) are usually hostile to inter-religious marriage and religious
pluralism, which can sometimes result in mob violence motivated by
allegations of love jihad.
Timeline
Early origins and beginnings
Similar controversies over inter religious marriage were relatively
common in India from the 1920s until independence in 1947, when
allegations of forced marriage were typically called "abductions".
They were more common in religiously diverse areas, including campaigns
against both Muslims and Christians, and were tied to fears over
religious demographics and political power in the newly emerging Indian
nation. Fears of women converting was also a catalyst of the violence against women that occurred during that period. However, allegations of Love Jihad first rose to national awareness in September 2009.
According to the Kerala Catholic Bishops Council, by October 2009 up to 4,500 girls in Kerala had been targeted, whereas Hindu Janajagruti Samiti claimed that 30,000 girls had been converted in Karnataka alone. Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana general secretary Vellapally Natesan said that there had been reports in Narayaneeya communities of "Love Jihad" attempts. Following the controversy's initial flare-up in 2009, it flared again in 2010, 2011 and 2014.On 25 June 2014, Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy
informed the state legislature that 2,667 young women converted to
Islam in the state between 2006 and 2014. However, he stated that there
was no evidence for any of them being forced to convert, and that fears
of Love Jihad were "baseless." Muslim organizations such as the Popular Front of India and the Campus Front have been accused of promoting this activity. In Kerala, some movies have been accused of promoting Love Jihad, a charge which has been denied by the filmmakers. Bollywood films PK and Bajrangi Bhaijaan were accused of promoting Love jihad by Hindu outfits. The actors and directors denied that their films promoted Love jihad.
Around the same time that the conspiracy theory was beginning to
spread, accounts of Love Jihad also began becoming prevalent in Myanmar. Wirathu, the leader of 969 Movement, has said that Muslim men pretend to be Buddhists and then the Buddhist women are lured into Islam in Myanmar. He has urged to "protect our Buddhist women from the Muslim love-jihad" by introducing further legislation. Reports of similar activities also began emerging from the United Kingdom's Sikh diaspora. In 2014, The Sikh Council alleged that it had received reports that girls from British Sikh
families were becoming victims of Love Jihad. Furthermore, these
reports alleged that these girls were being exploited by their husbands,
some of whom afterwards abandoned them in Pakistan. According to the
Takht jathedar, he alleged that "The Sikh council has rescued some of
the victims (girls) and brought them back to their parents."
Congress Party era (2009–2014)
The initial formations of the conspiracy theory were solidified when
various organisations began joining. Christian groups, such as the
Christian Association for Social Action, and the Vishva Hindu Parishad
(VHP) banded against it, with the VHP establishing the "Hindu Helpline"
that it started answered 1,500 calls in three months related to "Love
Jihad". The Union of Catholic Asian News (UCAN) has reported that the Catholic Church was concerned about this alleged phenomenon. In September, posters of right-wing group Shri Ram Sena warning against "Love Jihad" appeared in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.
The group announced in December that it would launch a nationwide "Save
our daughters, save India" campaign to combat "Love Jihad". Muslim organizations in Kerala called it a malicious misinformation campaign. Popular Front of India
(PFI) committee-member Naseeruddin Elamaram denied that the PFI was
involved in any "Love Jihad", stating that people convert to Hinduism
and Christianity as well and that religious conversion is not a crime. Members of the Muslim Central Committee of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts responded by claiming that Hindus and Christians have fabricated these claims to undermine Muslims.
In July 2010, the "Love Jihad" controversy resurfaced in the press when Kerala Chief Minister V. S. Achuthanandan referenced the alleged matrimonial conversion of non-Muslim girls as part of an effort to make Kerala a Muslim majority state. PFI dismissed his statements due to the findings of the Kerala probe, but the president of the BJP Mahila Morcha, the women's wing of the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party, called for an NIA investigation, alleging that the Kerala state probe was closed prematurely due to a tacit understanding with PFI. The Congress Party in Kerala responded strongly to the Chief Minister's comments, which they described as deplorable and dangerous.
In December 2011, the controversy erupted again in Karnataka legislative assembly, when member Mallika Prasad of the Bharatiya Janata Party
asserted that the problem was ongoing and unaddressed – with,
according to her, 69 of 84 Hindu girls who had gone missing between
January and November of that year confessing after their recovery that
"they'd been lured by Muslim youths who professed love." According to The Times of India, response was divided, with Deputy Speaker N. Yogish Bhat and House Leader S. Suresh Kumar supporting governmental intervention, while Congress membersB. Ramanath Rai and Abhay Chandra Jain argued that "the issue was being raised to disrupt communal harmony in the district."
Bharatiya Janata Party era (2014–present)
During the resurgence of the controversy in 2014, protests turned violent at growing concern, even though, according to Reuters, the concept was considered "an absurd conspiracy theory by mainstream, moderate Indians." Then BJP MP Yogi Adityanath alleged that Love Jihad was an international conspiracy targeting India,
announcing on television that the Muslims "can't do what they want by
force in India, so they are using the love jihad method here." Conservative Hindu activists cautioned women in Uttar Pradesh to avoid Muslims and not to befriend them.
In Uttar Pradesh, the influential committee Akhil Bharitiya Vaishya
Ekta Parishad announced their intention to push to restrict the use of
cell phones among young women to prevent their being vulnerable to such
activities.
Following this announcement, The Times of India reported that the Senior Superintendent of Police
in UP, Shalabh Mathur, "said the term 'love jihad' had been coined only
to create fear and divide society along communal lines." Muslim leaders referred to the 2014 rhetoric around the alleged conspiracy as a campaign of hate. Feminists voiced concerns that efforts to protect women against the alleged activities would negatively impact women's rights, depriving them of free choice and agency.
In September 2014, BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj claimed that Muslim boys in madrasas
are being motivated for Love Jihad with proposals of rewards of "Rs 11
lakh for an 'affair' with a Sikh girl, Rs 10 lakh for a Hindu girl and
Rs 7 lakh for a Jain girl." He claimed to know this through reports to
him by Muslims and by the experiences of men in his service who had
converted for access.
Abdul Razzaq Khan, the vice-president of Jamiat Ulama Hind, responded
by denying such activities, labeling the comments "part of conspiracy
aimed at disturbing the peace of the nation" and demanding action
against Maharaj. Uttar Pradesh minister Mohd Azam Khan indicated the statement was "trying to break the country". In January, Vishwa Hindu Parishad's women's wing, Durga Vahini used actor Kareena Kapoor's morphed picture half covered with burqa issue of their magazine, on the theme of Love Jihad. The caption underneath read: "conversion of nationality through religious conversion".
In June 2018, Jharkhand High Court granted a divorce in an alleged love
jihad case in which the accused lied about his religion and forcing the
victim to convert to Islam after marriage.
In May 2017, the Kerala High Court
annulled a marriage of a converted Hindu woman Akhila alias Hadiya to a
Muslim man Shafeen Jahan on the grounds that the bride's parents were
not present, nor gave consent for the marriage, after allegations by her
father of conversion and marriage at the behest of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Hadiya's father had claimed that his daughter had been influenced to
marry a Muslim man by some organisations so she no longer remained in
her parents' custody.
However, Hadiya claimed that she had been following Islam since 2012
and had left her home of her own will. Akhila was married to Shafeen by
the time her father's petition was taken up by the court, following
which her marriage was annulled.
The decision of the court was challenged by Shafeen in the Supreme Court of India in July 2017. The Supreme Court sought the response from the National Investigating Agency (NIA) and the Kerala government, ordering an NIA probe headed by former SC Judge R. V. Raveendran
on 16 August. The NIA had earlier submitted that the woman's conversion
and marriage was not "isolated" and it had detected a pattern emerging
in the state.
The Supreme Court on 8 March 2018 overturned the annulment of
Hadiya's marriage by the Kerala High Court and held that the she had
married of her own free will. However, it allowed NIA to continue
investigation into the allegations of a terror dimension.
The NIA examined 11 interfaith marriages in Kerala and completed its
investigation in October 2018, concluding that "the agency has not found
any evidence to suggest that in any of these cases either the man or
the woman was coerced to convert".
Despite drawing severe criticisms, the Syro Malabar Church
continued to repeat its stand on "love jihad". According to the church,
Christian women are being targeted, recruited to terrorist outfit
Islamic State, making them sex slaves and even killed. Detailing this, a circular, issued by Church chief Cardinal Mar George Alencherry, was read out in many parishes at the Sunday mass. In the circular (dated 15 January 2020) that was read out in churches on Sunday, it is stated that Christian
women are being targeted under a conspiracy through inter-religious
relationships, which often grow as a threat to religious harmony.
"Christian women from Kerala are even being recruited to Islamic State through this," the circular read.
Further, Kerala Catholic Bishops Conference's (KCBC) Commission for
Social Harmony and Vigilance, claimed that there were 4,000 instances of
"love jihad" between 2005 and 2012.
On 27 September 2020, protests occurred after a young Muslim man
attempted to kidnap a 21-year-old Hindu woman near her college campus,
and fatally shot her when she resisted. Her family said that he had
tried to force her to convert to Islam and marry him.
Many BJP-ruled states, such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Karnataka,
then began mulling over laws designed to prevent "forcible conversions"
through marriage, commonly referred to as "love jihad" laws. In September 2020, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath asked his government to come up with a strategy to prevent "religious conversions in the name of love". On 31 October, he announced that a law to curb "love jihad"
would be passed by his government. The law in Uttar Pradesh, which also
includes provisions against "unlawful religious conversion," declares a
marriage null and void if the sole intention was to "change a girl's
religion" and both it and the one in Madhya Pradesh imposed sentences of
up to 10 years in prison for those who broke the law.The ordinance came into effect on 28 November 2020 as the Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance. In December 2020, Madhya Pradesh approved an anti-conversion law similar to the Uttar Pradesh one. As of 25 November 2020, Haryana and Karnataka were still in discussion over similar ordinances.
In April 2021, the Gujarat Assembly amended the Freedom of Religion
Act, 2003, bringing in stringent provisions against forcible conversion
through marriage or allurement, with the intention of targeting "love
jihad".
The Karnataka state cabinet also approved an anti-conversion ‘love jihad’ bill, making it a law in December 2021.The Congress-led government scrapped the law in June 2023.
The conspiracy theory is noted for its similarities to other historic hate campaigns and instances Euro-American Islamophobia. It features Orientalist portrayals of Muslims as barbaric and hypersexual, and carries the paternalistic and patriarchal
notions that Hindu women are passive and victimized, while "any
possibility of women exercising their legitimate right to love and their
right to choice is ignored". It has consequently been the cause of vigilante assaults, murders and other violent incidents, including the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots.
Official investigations
India
In August 2017, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) stated that it had found a common "mentor" in some love jihad cases, "a woman associated with the radical group Popular Front of India", in August 2017. According to a later article in The Economist,
"Repeated police investigations have failed to find evidence of any
organised plan of conversion. Reporters have repeatedly exposed claims
of 'love jihad' as at best fevered fantasies and at worst, deliberate
election-time inventions."
According to the same report, the common theme regarding many claims of
"love jihad" has been the frenzied objection to an interfaith marriage
while "Indian law erects no barriers to marriages between faiths, or
against conversion by willing and informed consent. Yet the idea still
sticks, even when the supposed 'victims' dismiss it as nonsense."
In 2022, the Observer Research Foundation
and Indian government stated that no more than 100-200 Indians had
joined Islamic State, a figure so low that one researcher remarked that
"academics and experts often ask the question ‘What had prevented Indian
Muslims from joining the Islamic State?'."
Karnataka
In October 2009, the Karnataka government announced its intention to
counter "love jihad", which "appeared to be a serious issue". A week after the announcement, the government ordered a probe into the situation by the CID to determine if an organised effort existed to convert these girls and, if so, by whom it was being funded.
One woman, whose conversion to Islam came under scrutiny as a result of
the probe, was temporarily ordered to the custody of her parents, but
eventually was permitted to return to her new husband after she appeared
in court, denying pressure to convert.
In April 2010, police used the term to characterize the alleged
kidnapping, forced conversion and marriage of a 17-year-old college girl
in Mysore.
In late 2009, The Karnataka CID
(Criminal Investigation Department) reported that although it was
continuing to investigate, it had found no evidence that a "love jihad"
existed. In late 2009, Director general of police
Jacob Punnoose reported that although the investigation would continue,
there was no evidence of any organised attempt by any group or
individual using men "feigning love" to lure women to convert to Islam. Investigators did indicate that many Hindu girls had converted to Islam of their own will. In early 2010, the State Government reported to the Karnataka High Court that, although many young Hindu women had converted to Islam, there was no organized attempt to convince them to do so. According to The Indian Express, Justice K. T. Sankaran's
conclusion that "such incidents under the pretext of love were rampant
in certain parts of the state" ran contrary to Central and state
government reports.
A petition was also put before Sankaran to prevent the use of the terms
"love jihad" and "romeo jihad", but Sankaran declined to overrule an
earlier decision not to restrain media usage. Subsequently, the High Court stayed
further police investigation, both because no organised efforts had
been disclosed by police probes and because the investigation was
specifically targeted against a single community. In early 2010, the state government reported to the Karnataka High
Court that although many young Hindu women had converted to Islam, there
was no organized attempt to convince them to do so.
Kerala
Following the launching of a poster campaign in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, purportedly by the organisation Shri Ram Sena, state police began investigating the presence of that organisation in the area.
In late October 2009, police addressed the question of "love jihad"
itself, indicating that while they had not located an organisation
called "Love Jihad", "there are reasons to suspect 'concentrated
attempts' to persuade girls to convert to Islam after they fall in love
with Muslim boys".
In November 2009, DGPJacob Punnoose stated there was no organisation whose members lured girls in Kerala by feigning love with the intention of converting. He told the Kerala High Court
that three out of 18 reports he received questioned the tendency.
However, in absence of solid proof, the investigations were still
continuing.
In December 2009, Justice K.T. Sankaran, who had refused to accept
Punnoose's report, concluded from a case diary that there were
indications of forceful conversions and stated it was clear from police
reports there was a "concerted effort" to convert women with "blessings
of some outfits". The court, while hearing the bail plea of two
individuals accused in "love jihad" cases, stated that there had been
3,000-4,000 such conversions in the past four years.
The Kerala High Court in December 2009 stayed investigations in the
case, granting relief to the two accused, though it criticised the
police investigation.
The investigation was closed by Justice M. Sasidharan Nambiar following
Punnoose's statements that no conclusive evidence could be found for
the existence of "love jihad".
On 9 December 2009, Justice K T Sankaran for the Kerala High
Court weighed in on the matter while hearing bail for a Muslim youth
arrested for allegedly forcibly converting two female students.
According to Sankaran, police reports revealed the "blessings of some
outfits" for a "concerted" effort for religious conversions, some 3,000
to 4,000 incidences of which had taken place after love affairs within a
four-year period.
Sankaran "found indications of 'forceful' religious conversions under
the garb of 'love'", suggesting that "such 'deceptive' acts" might
require legislative intervention to prevent them.
In January 2012, Kerala police declared that "love jihad" was
"[a] campaign with no substance", bringing legal proceedings instead
against the website hindujagruti.org for "spreading religious hatred and false propaganda." In 2012, after two years of investigation into the alleged "love jihad", Kerala Police
declared it as a "campaign with no substance". Subsequently, a case was
initiated against the hindujagruti website, where counterfeit posters
of Muslim organisations offering money to Muslim youths for luring and
trapping women were found.
In 2017, after the Kerala High Court had ruled that a marriage of
a Hindu woman to a Muslim man was invalid on the basis of"'love jihad",
and an appeal was filed in the Supreme Court of India by the Muslim husband. The court, based on the "unbiased and independent" evidence requested by the court from the NIA,
instructed the NIA to investigate all similar cases to establish
whether there was any "love jihad". It allowed the NIA to explore all
similar suspicious cases to find whether banned organisations, such as SIMI, were preying on vulnerable Hindu women to recruit them as terrorists.
The NIA had earlier submitted before the court that the case was not an
"isolated" incident and it had detected a pattern emerging in the
state, stating that another case involved the same individuals who had
previously acted as instigators.
In 2018, the NIA concluded its probe, after investigating 11 interfaith
marriages in Kerala without finding proof of coercion, and an NIA
official concluded that "we didn't find any prosecutable evidence to
bring formal charges against these persons under any of the scheduled
offences of the NIA", adding that "Conversion is not a crime in Kerala
and also helping these men and women convert is also within the ambit of
the constitution of the country."
In 2021, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan
stated that "no complaints or clear information were received regarding
forced conversion", and that, of the data available to the ministry,
"none of the figures validate the propaganda that girls are being lured
into conversion and terrorist organizations".
Uttar Pradesh
In September 2014, following the resurgence of national attention, Reuters
reported that police in Uttar Pradesh had found no credence in the five
or six recent allegations of "love jihad" that had been brought before
them, with state police chief A.L. Banerjee stating that, "In most cases
we found that a Hindu girl and Muslim boy were in love and had married
against their parents' will." The police stated that occasional cases of trickery by dishonest men are not evidence of a broader conspiracy.
That same month, the Allahabad High Court
gave the government and election commission of Uttar Pradesh ten days
to respond to a petition to restrain the use of the word "love jihad"
and to take action against Yogi Adityanath.
In 2018, a report by the fundamentalist Sikh activist organisation, Sikh Youth UK,
entitled "The Religiously Aggravated Sexual Exploitation of Young Sikh
Women Across the UK" (RASE report) made similar allegations of Muslim
men targeting Sikh girls for the purposes of conversion.
The report was severely criticised in 2019 by academic researchers and
by an official UK government report, led by two Sikh academics, for
false and misleading information. It noted: "The
RASE report lacks solid data, methodological transparency and rigour.
It is filled instead with sweeping generalisations and poorly
substantiated claims around the nature and scale of abuse of Sikh girls
and causal factors driving it. It appealed heavily to historical
tensions between Sikhs and Muslims and narratives of honour in a way
that seemed designed to whip up fear and hate".
Previously, in 2011, Sikh academic Katy Sian had conducted
research into the matter, exploring how "forced conversion narratives"
arose within the Sikh diaspora in the United Kingdom and why they became so widespread.
Sian, who reports that claims of conversion through courtship on
campuses are widespread in the UK, says that rather than relying on
actual evidence, the Sikh community primarily rest their beliefs on the
word of "a friend of a friend" or personal anecdotes. According to Sian, the narrative is similar to accusations of "white slavery" lodged against the Jewish community and foreigners to the UK and the US, with the former having ties to anti-semitism that mirror the Islamophobia displayed by the modern narrative. Sian expanded on these views in her 2013 book, Mistaken Identities, Forced Conversions, and Postcolonial Formations.
In response to a flurry of sensational news stories on the subject, ten Hindu academics in the UK signed an open letter
wherein they argued that claims of Hindu and Sikh girls being
forcefully converted in the UK were "part of an arsenal of myths
propagated by right-wing Hindu supremacist organisations in India". The Muslim Council of Britain
issued a press release pointing out there was a lack of evidence of any
forced conversions, and suggested it was an underhanded attempt to
smear the British Muslim population.
In response to the purported conspiracy of love jihad, affiliates of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh have stated that they have launched a Reverse Love Jihad campaign to marry Hindu men with Muslim women. Cases related to the campaign were reported from various parts of Uttar Pradesh
(U.P.), where rape and abduction of Muslim women have taken place. The
perpetrators of these incidents are alleged to be the members of these
affiliates who are being rewarded by the affiliates for their
activities. Between 2014 and October 2016, 389 cases of underage girls
missing or kidnapped were registered by the police in Kushinagar district, and a similar trend was found in a number of districts in eastern Uttar Pradesh, in areas with high communal tensions.
The term Reverse Love Jihad has also been used by the Bajrang Dal
to refer to the Love Jihad conspiracy theory where the purported victim
is a Hindu man being "lured" to Islam with the prospects of a job and
marriage to a Muslim woman.
The Bhagwa Love Trap conspiracy theory,
which alleges that Hindu men lure Muslim women into relationships with
the intention of converting them to Hinduism, has been popularized on
social media.
Sensemaking or sense-making is the process by which people give meaning
to their collective experiences. It has been defined as "the ongoing
retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what
people are doing" (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005, p. 409). The concept was introduced to organizational studies by Karl E. Weick
in the late 1960's and has affected both theory and practice. Weick
intended to encourage a shift away from the traditional focus of
organization theorists on decision-making and towards the processes that constitute the meaning of the decisions that are enacted in behavior.
Definition
There
is no single agreed upon definition of sensemaking, but there is
consensus that it is a process that allows people to understand
ambiguous, equivocal or confusing issues or events.
Disagreements about the meaning of sensemaking exist around whether
sensemaking is a mental process within the individual, a social process
or a process that occurs as part of discussion; whether it is an ongoing
daily process or only occurs in response to rare events; and whether
sensemaking describes past events or considers the future.
Sensemaking further refers not only to a process, be it mental or
social, that occurs in organizations but also a broader perspective on
what organization is and what it means for people to be organized. Overall five distinct schools of sensemaking/sense-making have been identified.
Roots in organizational psychology
In 1966, Daniel Katz and Robert L. Kahn published The Social Psychology of Organizations (Katz & Kahn, 1966). In 1969, Karl Weick played on this title in his book The Social Psychology of Organizing, shifting the focus from organizations as entities to organizing as an activity. It was especially the second edition, published ten years later (Weick, 1979) that established Weick's approach in organization studies.
Weick's approach to sensemaking
Weick identified seven properties of sensemaking (Weick, 1995):
Retrospection provides the opportunity for sensemaking: the point of retrospection in time affects what people notice (Dunford & Jones, 2000), thus attention and interruptions to that attention are highly relevant to the process (Gephart, 1993).
Sensemaking is a social activity in that plausible stories are preserved, retained or shared (Isabella, 1990; Maitlis, 2005). However, the audience for sensemaking includes the speakers themselves (Watson, 1995) and the narratives are "both individual and shared...an evolving product of conversations with ourselves and with others" (Currie & Brown, 2003: 565).
Sensemaking is ongoing, so Individuals simultaneously shape
and react to the environments they face. As they project themselves onto
this environment and observe the consequences they learn about their
identities and the accuracy of their accounts of the world (Thurlow & Mills, 2009).
This is a feedback process so even as individuals deduce their identity
from the behaviour of others towards them, they also try to influence
this behaviour. As Weick argued, "The basic idea of sensemaking is that
reality is an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create
order and make retrospective sense of what occurs" (Weick, 1993: 635).
People extract cues from the context to help them decide on what information is relevant and what explanations are acceptable (Salancick & Pfeffer, 1978; Brown, Stacey, & Nandhakumar, 2007).
Extracted cues provide points of reference for linking ideas to broader
networks of meaning and are 'simple, familiar structures that are seeds
from which people develop a larger sense of what may be occurring." (Weick, 1995: 50).
People favour plausibility over accuracy in accounts of events and contexts (Currie & Brown, 2003; Brown, 2005; Abolafia, 2010):
"in an equivocal, postmodern world, infused with the politics of
interpretation and conflicting interests and inhabited by people with
multiple shifting identities, an obsession with accuracy seems
fruitless, and not of much practical help, either" (Weick, 1995: 61).
Each of these seven aspects interact and intertwine as individuals
interpret events. Their interpretations become evident through narratives – written and spoken – which convey the sense they have made of events (Currie & Brown, 2003), as well as through diagrammatic reasoning and associated material practices (Huff, 1990; Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012).
From decision-making to sensemaking
The
rise of the sensemaking perspective marks a shift of focus in
organization studies from how decisions shape organizations to how
meaning drives organizing (Weick, 1993).
The aim was to focus attention on the largely cognitive activity of
framing experienced situations as meaningful. It is a collaborative
process of creating shared awareness and understanding out of different
individuals' perspectives and varied interests. Weick described the
social and historical context in the late 1960s as being important in
this shift from decision-making to sensemaking: "These ideas coincided
with a growing societal realization that administrators in Washington
were trying to justify committing more resources to a war in Vietnam
that the United States was clearly losing. One could not escape the
feeling that rationality had a demonstrable retrospective core, that
people looked forward with anxiety and put the best face on it after the
fact, and that the vaunted prospective skills of McNamara’s “whiz kids”
in the Pentagon were a chimera. It was easy to put words to this mess.
People create their own fate. Organizations enact their own
environments. The point seemed obvious."
From planning to action
Sensemaking scholars are less interested in the intricacies of planning than in the details of action (Weick, 1995, p. 55).
Uncertainty, ambiguity, and crisis
The
sensemaking approach is often used to provide insight into factors that
surface as organizations address either uncertain or ambiguous
situations (Weick 1988, 1993; Weick et al., 2005), including deep uncertainty. Beginning in the 1980s with an influential re-analysis of the Bhopal disaster, Weick's name has come to be associated with the study of the situated sensemaking that influences the outcomes of disasters (Weick 1993).
Categories and related concepts
A
2014 review of the literature on sensemaking in organizations
identified a dozen different categories of sensemaking and a half-dozen
sensemaking related concepts (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014).
The categories of sensemaking included: constituent-minded, cultural,
ecological, environmental, future-oriented, intercultural,
interpersonal, market, political, prosocial, prospective, and
resourceful. The sensemaking-related concepts included: sensebreaking,
sensedemanding, sense-exchanging, sensegiving, sensehiding, and sense
specification.
Other applications
Sensemaking is central to the conceptual framework for military network-centric operations (NCO) espoused by the United States Department of Defense (Garstka and Alberts, 2004).
In a joint/coalition military environment, sensemaking is complicated
by numerous technical, social, organizational, cultural, and operational
factors. A central hypothesis of NCO is that the quality of shared
sensemaking and collaboration will be better in a "robustly networked"
force than in a platform-centric force, empowering people to make better
decisions. According to NCO theory, there is a mutually-reinforcing
relationship among and between individual sensemaking, shared
sensemaking, and collaboration.
In defense applications, sensemaking theorists have primarily
focused on how shared awareness and understanding are developed within command and control
organizations at the operational level. At the tactical level,
individuals monitor and assess their immediate physical environment in
order to predict where different elements will be in the next moment. At
the operational level, where the situation is far broader, more complex
and more uncertain, and evolves over hours and days, the organization
must collectively make sense of enemy dispositions, intentions and capabilities, as well as anticipate the (often unintended) effects of own-force actions on a complex system of systems.
Sensemaking has been studied in the patient safety literature (Battles, et al. 2006). It has been used as a conceptual framework for identifying and detecting high risk patient situations. For example, Rhodes, et al. (2015) examined sensemaking and the co-production of safety of primary medical care patients.
