Ismat Ara’s saffron narrative
Saffron is an eyesore to “pseudo-intellectuals”.
It was a normal working day in Kerala in the year 2024. I was on my way back after the second-year LLB class in Government Law College, Thrissur. The Venadu Express plying between Shornur and Thiruvananthapuram was running on time, and I boarded a second-class compartment from Thrissur. The bogey was almost empty, and I managed to get a window seat. A youth of around 20 years of age, dressed in jeans and a white shirt, and a girl of 18 years were sitting on the opposite seat and were busy cuddling and kissing each other. Since I was against ogling of any kind, my eyes turned towards the entrance of the compartment. Another youth and a burqa-clad girl were standing near the door of the train and were filming the activities of the lovebirds sitting in front of me with their mobile cameras.
Needless to say, the youth in jeans belonged to the Muslim community while the girl was a Hindu. Both of them were on their way to Kochi to celebrate their freedom, while the other pair was ensuring that the girl did not go haywire afterwards. The video footage would serve as a trap to enslave the girl once and forever. After some time, I got down at Aluva where I had parked my car, and made it back to my house. I leave it to the wisdom of the readers to imagine and presume what would have happened to the girl. This is a normal sight in the cities, towns, trains and buses in Kerala, where Love Jihad is at its peak now.
Some time back, there was an infamous case of a medical student, daughter of a CPI(M) leader, eloping with a Muslim boy to get married to him. The girl, Akhila, changed her name to Hadiya after getting herself converted to Islam. The youth with whom she eloped was a local gangster and had many criminal cases registered against him. Asokan, the CPI(M) leader, approached the Kerala High Court with a habeas corpus petition seeking the release of his daughter from the clutches of the mercenaries. Though Asokan and his wife pleaded with their daughter Akhila to return with them to their home, the girl paid scant respect to their requests and chose to go away with the Muslim youth. The Bench of K Surendra Mohan expressed its displeasure over the way the police probed the allegations made by the parents of the girl, and the judge made it known in his verdict that all was not well with the investigation report. The next day saw hundreds of activists and leaders of the Popular Front of India staging a demonstration in front of the Kerala High Court shouting provocative slogans against Justice Surendra Mohan. The protesters shouted “Sanghi Surendra Mohan go back… Down with the Sanghi Judge…” since they thought that the judge was a Sanatani. It was only the next day that they came to know that Surendra Mohan, despite his Hindu name, was a church-going devout Christian! Though the life of Hadiya ended up as one of the slaves in the harem of a Muslim chieftain in Malabar, the bloomer committed by the PFI activists still echoes along the coast of Kerala.
The number of Hindu girls who have eloped with their Muslim princes over the last five years has shot up at an unbelievable rate and still continues in the state. The Islamic Romeos deploy all the tricks in their armour to woo the girls, promising them a luxurious life post-marriage. In most of the cases, the victims, shocked by the kind of treatment they get once the honeymoon period is over, resort to suicide, and this is a regular feature in Kerala. T P Senkumar, former chief of the State Police, has written about this disturbing phenomenon in an eloquent manner, quoting the facts and figures collected by the intelligence department, and this is shocking.
Not only young girls, but even middle-aged women fall into the traps laid by the Jihadis, and many have lost their lives. The misfortune that struck the family of late Sukumaran, a leading film actor of the 1980s and 1990s, offers an insight into the functioning of the Love Jihadis. Sukumaran’s sister was the manager of a nationalised bank in Malappuram district. A Muslim extremist managed to woo her with sweet talk and made her part with all her personal savings (cash and gold jewellery) worth crores of rupees. He also made her borrow all kinds of loans from the bank and had promised her that he would marry her. But when it was time to repay the loan amount to the bank, the man started avoiding her. When the lady insisted that he should pay her the amount which she had borrowed from the bank, he chose the easy way out. He murdered her, and the romantic story came to an end. Since the incident took place in Malappuram, which is Kerala’s own Pakistan, no Hindus were willing to take up the issue, and the murderer continues his victory march even today.
If these instances are brought to the attention of civil society, our liberal, secular, socialist and democratic cultural leaders categorise them all as “isolated incidents” which are not worth discussing. This is the ground reality in God’s Own Country where Muslims and Christians are more equal than the Sanatanis. The readers are likely to ask about the raison d’être of this write-up. Security experts, since time immemorial, have been warning us that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. There is a secret agenda behind these love jihads, and that is to subvert the religious demography of India. All the girls who elope with the Romeos are forced to convert to Islam and give birth to children who grow up as extremists and terrorists. Wasn’t it Auguste Comte who taught us that demography is destiny? Though much has been written about religious conversion by scholars like Sita Ram Goel and Arun Shourie, the targeted audience does not take note of their warnings. Meanwhile, the army of secular writers and authors continue writing books after books eulogising the virtues of inter-religious marriages, live-in relationships and divorces. What goes unnoticed is the fact that these characters have made marriages into some kind of carnival. These “intellectuals” target the sacred and divine family concept which has held Bharat together since ancient days.
The new entrant to the band of secular writers is Ismat Ara, a propagandist-turned-author who has portrayed India in poor light with her book ‘Under A Saffron Sky: Inside India’s Crackdown on Love‘ published by Penguin Books. For Ara, the term saffron itself is anathema and anything associated with the colour is dirty, ugly and haram. For someone representing the religion of peace which insists that all infidels and idolaters should be slain, there is nothing new in her arguments. But before venturing out to humiliate this ancient civilisation, the author could have studied what India is. The trend since 2014, or even before that, was to write all kinds of nonsense about India to establish oneself as an “intellectual”. Anything against Sanatan Dharma would sell, and sell well, in the global market. Ara should write a book against Narendra Modi, which is sure to elevate her as an Indologist of repute, maybe as a challenger to the all-time great of this genre, Arundhati Roy. The likes of Ara enjoy spitting venom on Sanatan Dharma and spread all kinds of cock-and-bull stories about it. Since Sanatanis do not give any credence to such allegations and fake narratives, the likes of Ara have their cake and eat it too. Even if you do not read this book, nothing is going to happen, despite the fact that another Ara would appear in our landscape. To sum it up, all one could say about such works is that they are simply nonsense. And please remember that Uttar Pradesh has become a safe state thanks to the police succeeding in eradicating and eliminating gangsters like Mukhtar Ansari (nephew of former vice president Hamid Ansari), Atiq Ahmed and others. For those who want to cut India into pieces (remember the Tukde-Tukde gang), this great nation would continue to be an eyesore.
Under A Saffron Sky by
Ismat Ara
Penguin
Rs 799/-
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1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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