54 12 februAry 2018The virulence of Hindutva politics
is on full display on Facebook, Twit-
ter, WhatsApp and Instagram, where
individual identities are subjected
to scrutiny every day, held up to the
flame like letters written in invisible
ink. “I have been following 20 cases of
love jihad based on leads from Face-
book alone. Eight have been resolved;
we are working on the rest. We work
closely with families, because that is
the most honourable way to end this
social evil,” says Rajasekharananda
Swami, 41, a sadhu who heads the Va-
jradehi Matha, a tranquil ashram on
the banks of the Gurupura river, about
12 km from Mangaluru. He has set up
a 21-member Love Jihad Taskforce,
including lawyers and counsellors.
There is no dearth of donations for the
cause, he says, meeting us after his morning prayers. His ashram is
home to 30 orphaned children and dozens of abandoned cattle. The
fight against love jihad is just another aspect of his social service.
The taskforce works with a team of 60 students from Mangaluru
colleges who report interfaith relationships. “I have spoken to yogi
Adityanathji and other Hindu leaders about the seriousness of the
problem here due to our proximity to Kerala. They welcomed my
move to take action,” he says.
A
BUMPy BUS ride down winding country roads takes us
to Belvai, about an hour-and-a-half from Mangaluru. The
bus makes a stop at Moodbidri, where a middle-aged man sits
hunched at a streetside flower stall. He is Anand Poojary, the father
of Prashant Poojary, a 29-year-old Bajrang Dal activist whose mur-
der on October 9th, 2015, allegedly at the hands of Popular Front of
India members, rocked Dakshina Kannada. “He was a committed
worker, and his death was a big loss,” says Somnath Kotian, 45,
the Dal leader in Belvai, driving us in his SUV to the village of
Priyanka Bhandary. He has several cases pending against him in
courts, but none of them is “personal”, he says. Kotian runs a gro-
cery store in Belvai and takes cares of the family farm, but much
of his time is spent championing the cause of Hindutva. So when
he got a call from Bhujanga Kulal, the district convenor of the
Dal, on the morning of December 9th, 2017, he immediately set
out for Daregudde, where a Hindu girl had duped her parents to
elope with a Muslim. “This had never happened before in Belvai.
Here, people don’t even marry outside their caste,” says Kotian.
Priyanka’s mother, Veena Bhandary, 48, is a bidi-roller whose
husband died 18 years ago. She has spent much of the past month at
her sister’s house nearby, unable to come to terms with her daugh-
ter’s trickery, even though activists keep assuring her that Priyanka
was ‘mesmerised’ into running away. “It was the day of the mehendi
and the house was full of guests. Priyanka was in a good mood. She
was, after all, getting married to a boy she had known for six years.
Dinesh had plans to take her to Dubai,” says Bhandary, who looks
hollowed out. Priyanka had failed the English paper in her PUC
exams and started working at a garments factory 4 km away for
Rs 4,000 a month. She helped her mother roll bidis that they sold
at Rs 150 per 1,000. She spent two years in Mumbai as a nanny for a
distant relative. “When she made pomegranate juice for us, every-
one drank it and I unwittingly refused. So when I woke up at 4 am
and found her gone, it was a rude shock,” Bhandary says. “All the
arrangements had been made. What were we to do now?” Kotian
and members of the Bhandary Samaj took control of the situation.
“In any case, she was lost to us. I saw her at the police station after
two weeks and I did not want to take her back,” Bhandary says.
Their next meeting, at a secret location in Puttur, would be
different, thanks to the efforts of a counsellor who spent hours
convincing her to stand by Priyanka in her hour of need. At an are-
canut processing plant in Puttur, we wait for Vidya Gowri, 51, who
pulls up in a Tata Nano, smartly dressed in a black sari. Priyanka
is in no state to meet anyone, she clarifies. For nearly a month,
Gowri has visited Priyanka for a few hours every day, coaxing her
to open up and trying to redeem her from her Sisyphean heart-
ache. “She regrets it all. She realises that he left her alone when
the police came after her,” Gowri says. There is a certain artifice
to her counselling sessions, where she sometimes asks probing
questions to check if Priyanka has really ‘turned’. But much of it
is constructive. The experiment is perhaps the most ambitious
counselling initiative in the history of ‘love jihad’ in Karnataka. “I
cannot let [Hindutva activists] question her or marry her off, not
yet. I have worked hard to gain her trust. I cannot let her down
now,” Gowri says. When we return to Mangaluru, members of
the Dal and Durga Vahini, having tracked our movements, are
disappointed to learn that we did not interview Priyanka. They
cannot wait to see her risen from the ashes of her past, a phoenix
burning, blazing, for their noble Hindu cause. ndispatch
“before Priyanka, love jihad had never happened before in
belvai. Here, people don’t even marry outside their caste”
Somnath Kotian Bajrang Dal leader from Belvai