Politics of Secularisation, Religious Conversion, and “Saving” the (Hindu) Daughter under Hindutva: Re-reading the Hadiya Court Case

Abstract

This article charts the different modalities of political transgression that marked an act of religious conversion and inter-faith marriage performed by a Muslim female subject in contemporary India, and the subsequent misreading of this transgression; a misreading made possible by liberal political thought’s delineations of the conceptual category of “interest”. Existing legal, political, academic, and popular discourses have read the prominent 2016 event of the conversion of a Hindu woman named Akhila into Islam, as either the “false consciousness” of a “vulnerable” individual whose self-interests were unintelligible to herself, or, as an unambiguous case of a “mature” woman in a “modernising” Kerala “choosing” to opt for an inter-faith marriage and to convert; a liberal idiom of choice that thereby needs to be safeguarded via Constitutional provisions. The article, even while acknowledging the political need to adhere to the latter reading/constitution of the female (Islamic) subject’s sovereign desire to convert, shows some of the limitations of both these ideologically antithetical positions. It argues that the desire of Hadiya (Akhila’s new name after converting to Islam) to convert remains unreadable by both the right-wing Indian judiciary, backed up by Hindutva forces, as well as the “left-liberal” feminist intelligentsia that sought to support her autonomy. In fact, both these ideologically opposed stances often legitimised each other. By examining the legal debates that took place in the Indian courts, the article shows how construing Hadiya’s act of conversion solely through the legal-juridical prisms of “religious freedom” and “choice”, pegged to the concept of self-interest, is vigorously insufficient.