My name is Syed Munavar and I support love jihad. There I said it! Before you jump up to lynch me, let me put my case. First, let’s get the meaning of “jihad” straight. Not the media-propagated image of a fat Muslim with a long beard and cap yelling “Allahu Akbar” and throwing a bomb at you. I am talking about the actual meaning of the Arabic word “jihad” — it means to strive or struggle.

So in a world ravaged by war, and religious, racial and cultural terrorism, if “love jihad” means to strive for love, I am all for it.

We often wake up to the news of some couple getting lynched, forcefully separated or socially boycotted because they did not meet the societal standards of marriage. Leave alone inter-religious marriage, Indian society opposes inter-caste marriage, inter-community marriage and a lot more. I was once told by a friend that their sub-caste members frown if members of the caste marry another member of the same caste but of a different sub-caste!

Imagine the horror. If an inter sub-caste marriage is causing so many problems, how much trouble an inter-religious wedding will cause. No wonder innocent young boys like Shankar and Ankit Saxena are getting hacked to death because they dared to cross the invisible boundary.

We also have dozens of mob sena’s and fundamentalist organisations who thrive on this fear and threaten the families of boys and girls who consider an inter-community wedding. They distribute pamphlets, spread hate videos and form mobs that harass couples.

The avalanche of fake content on social media brainwashes many gullible people. Shambhulal Regar, who burnt a labourer on the pretext of love jihad and captured the killing on camera, was obsessed with watching hate videos on Whatsapp.

The caste system over the course of time has become one of the worst forms of human exploitations in history. We have seen hundreds of generations of people being forced to literally “take our shit” and clean our gutters only because they were born in a particular family.

While modern India seems to have scraped this evil practice, in reality it still exists. We have grudgingly accepted it in schools, colleges and work spaces but we still shiver when it comes to marriage.

We are taught right from childhood how our caste or religion is superior to that of others. Mistrust exists in our society because of the phobia of the unknown. We are brainwashed through the media, our parents and community about how the so-called other community eats, prays, copulates, maintains their hygiene, etc.

We slowly get scared of them and as Yoda says: “Fear is the path to the dark side… fear leads to anger… anger leads to hate… hate leads to suffering.”

By the time we are adults, most of us conform to the casteist and communal perspective of our parents’ generation. I feel deeply saddened when young India falls into the trap of the older generation and sticks to the conformity of the past.

Everybody agrees that as Indians our national identity precedes our regional, religious and cultural identity. So if the first benchmark of our identity is Indian, then why do we become hostile when fellow Indians marry outside their caste and community?

With thousands of riots in the history of independent India, if we take a step towards integrating with the national identity, shouldn’t we be celebrated? Our culture and traditions must be celebrated not by creating a wall around them, but by opening up to one another.

Even if we don’t have any larger agenda of national integration, as adults of a democratic nation we have the right to marry whosoever we want. If we have the right to choose the leader of our country, don’t we have the right to choose our partners? No priest, imam or mob can force us not to.

As Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra said: “Whether it is parents, society or anyone, they are out of it. No one, either individual or collective, or group, has the right to interfere with marriage.”

Ambedkar, the writer of our Constitution and one of the finest intellectual minds of independent India, called for annihilation of caste. In his book Annihilation of Caste, he writes: “You are right in holding that caste will cease to be an operative farce only when inter-dining and inter-marriage have become matters of common course.”

Even the Union ministry of social justice and empowerment, through the ‘Dr Ambedkar Scheme for Social Integration through Inter-Caste Marriage’, promises to give Rs 2.5 lakh as compensation to every inter-caste couple where the bride or groom is from the Dalit community.

Shouldn’t we as a modern society take Ambedkar’s ideology one step further by saying we will not only annihilate caste but also religious segregation through inter-religion marriages?

What we are myopic in understanding is that we are not forgetting our past, culture and roots by acknowledging and accepting the other side. A 10,000-year-old civilisation cannot simply vanish by integrating. In fact, it will become stronger.

The more united we are, the less politicians will be able to divide us across caste and communal lines. We will finally start voting for politicians based on their merit instead of their caste or community.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t those from across the spectrum who would want to convert their partner to their religion upon marriage. They may have a sinister agenda, or they may just cop out at the last moment due to family pressure and coerce their partners to convert. But I believe true love won’t differentiate between religions and if your partner is forcing you to convert to their religion, their love is not worth attaining.

Couples brave enough to take the leap and have an inter-caste or inter-community marriage face social boycott. We can help them by standing by them. We can help them by making it easy for them to get apartments on rent, by accepting them in our workplaces and families, and encouraging our kith and kin who are brave enough to do so, as well as by fighting the divisive politics of communal parties.

India has major problems and needs a complete revolution in sanitation, infrastructure, resource management, healthcare, judicial reforms, poverty management, police system, etc. It is high time we as a society stop interfering in the personal life of consenting adults and focus on issues that really concern us on a larger level. Inter-community marriages were boycotted during the Apartheid and in fascist countries, not in a civilised society. The world has moved ahead, it is high time we do too.

Says the evergreen romantic ballad by Eden Ahbez – ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return’. I don’t know if this is true or ‘pyar ek dhoka hai’, as claimed by hundreds of youngsters who recently shouted their hearts out in Mumbai. But what I do know is that I have the choice to find out with whomever I want!