Hindu nationalism has increasingly packaged itself as a movement aimed at emancipatory social and political reforms for women. The movement appeals to India as a feminine goddess-like figure of ‘Bharat Mata’, while parties such as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have co-opted growing rhetoric around women’s representation.
The BJP-led government’s claim to credit for anointing a President who is both a woman and from an adivasi (indigenous tribal) background — Draupadi Murmu — exemplifies such political optics. Prominent far-right women politicians, such as Smriti Irani and the terror-accused Pragya Singh Thakur, along with a growing number of far-right hate preachers from Sadhvi Ritambhara to Kajal Hindusthani, all signal the increasing presence of women under the Hindu nationalist fold.
In this broader context, it is crucial to witness another transformation taking place in day-to-day social life, particularly regarding Indian women’s rights and their agency over their personal lives.
Far-right groups have consolidated their influence across India’s institutions, enabled by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP-led government. As the alliance enters its eleventh year into power, groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal, Hindu Yuva Vahini, and others form beneath the larger umbrella of far-right politics, one that is now extending into institutions including the judiciary, media and other aspects of the public sphere.
Justice Shekhar Kumar Yadav of the Allahabad high court delivered an incendiary, anti-Muslim speech at a VHP event, even as the Supreme Court has, in the recent past, delivered controversial orders protecting revisionist Hindu nationalist interests against medieval mosques. Similar displays of hate speech and the platforming of vigilante groups is evident regularly on mainstream news debates
In electoral politics, some experts attribute the BJP’s victories in state elections partly to the party’s ‘women centric’ schemes. In Maharashtra’s 2024 assembly elections, for instance, commentators pointed to government-run programs like the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana, which promised to deposit a token sum of 1,500 rupees (17 USD) monthly into women’s bank accounts.
Hindu nationalism is being packaged as a movement that seeks to include and empower women. But the infantilizing and protectionist beliefs of Hindu nationalist groups, as well as state-sanctioned laws, is effectively curtailing women’s freedoms.
Love, Caste, and the Politics of Control
The politics around love, marriage and women’s choices have always been fraught in India’s caste-ridden society, where women are affixed the role of custodians for a community or as caste’s “honor.” Their choices are policed and families are often the first to do so through so-called honor killings. Although Indian authorities did not record honor killings until 2014, and many go unreported by being recorded as general murders or homicides, other sources such as the country’s Supreme Court recorded 288 ‘honor’ killings in India between 2014 and 2016.
Official records from the National Crime Records Bureau registered 203 such cases totalled between the years 2017 to 2021. Meanwhile an NGO named Evidence found that there were 187 such cases in just one state of Tamil Nadu alone, between the years 2012 to 2017. This culture of community ‘honor’, and policing of women’s agency has taken a sharper turn for the worse since the advent of the BJP.
By denying women of their freedom to choose, these paternalistic laws foreclose relationships outside of religious and caste endogamy, portending a chilling clampdown similar to Nazi-era anti-miscegenation laws and the restrictions on interracial relationships in Jim Crow-era America.
Across the world, historically and at present, far-right groups and movements coalesce on identifying an imagined ‘other,’ as well as creating mechanisms of surveillance and policing to further divisions, with women often being victims to this. Women entering into interracial relationships as in Jim Crow-era and segregationist America were policed and surveilled even as black men faced ostracism and overt physical and social violence that threatened their lives. But even as recently as the 2020s, reports show white supremacists actively attempt to dox interracial couples and threaten to leak their personal information, tactics that mirror those of their Hindu nationalist counterparts.
In Israel, the far-right group ‘Lehava’ is another clear illustration of this link between policing relationships and the imagined community ‘purity’ by weaponizing vigilanteism against relationships between Jews and Arabs.
However, nowhere is this vigilantism as institutionally pervasive and endemic as India, where the persistence of caste and religious stratification across society is linked to how marriages and relationships are determined.
Anti-Conversion Laws and the Erosion of Women’s Agency
Indian historian Charu Gupta notes: “In India, the Hindu right particularly has been a master at creating panics around expressions of love, be it Valentine’s Day, homosexual love, or inter-caste and inter-religious romance, posing them as one of the biggest threats to cohesive community identities and boundaries.” Nowhere is this policing more visible than in the onset of draconian anti-conversion laws in at least 12 states across India.
These stringent laws against purported forced religious conversion, as seen in BJP-ruled states like Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Rajasthan have overtly criminalised religious conversion for marriage. The culmination of this has made it harder than ever before for interfaith couples to get married, with the requirement of at least 60 days’ notice period before district authorities, in order for a person to convert. These laws, such as Uttar Pradesh’s law against religious conversion, allow for any unaffected third-party member—including Hindu vigilantes—to object to the conversion. The penalty for women and marginalised castes being ‘forced’ to convert is also higher, effectively creating grounds for Muslim men and other minorities to be easily arrested on charges of forced conversion.
Interfaith marriage in India has long been a fraught issue, with multiple legal and social barriers preventing such unions. As per a 2014 survey of more than 70,000 respondents, less than 10% of urban Indians reported that anyone in their family had married outside of one’s caste. Interfaith unions were even more arduous to find with hardly 5% of the urban respondents said they had seen marriages outside of religion in their families.
To make matters worse, in a society where religious personal laws still reign supreme, the more-secular Special Marriage Act of 1954 (SMA) presents significant administrative hurdles. Couples must issue a 30-day notice before marrying, during which their personal details, including home addresses, are displayed on a public notice board. These intrusive requirements often leave couples with little choice but to convert simply to ease the process of marriage.
As established by several news reports, these anti-conversion laws have been used to restrict interfaith marriages. For instance, soon after Uttar Pradesh’s anti-conversion law was passed in November 2020, reports emerged from Moradabad that members of Bajrang Dal, a militant Hindu nationalist group, had handed a young woman over to the police. The group justified its actions by claiming the new law was designed for precisely such cases. The woman, 22-year-old Muskan, had fallen in love with a Muslim man, Rashid, and married him in July 2020 after deciding to convert. By December, Muskan was pregnant, but under the newly enacted law, Rashid was arrested at the behest of far-right vigilantes. Muskan was sent to a government shelter, where she later suffered a miscarriage while her husband remained imprisoned.
In 2024, the BJP-ruled state of Uttarakhand in northern India introduced a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) aside from a draconian anti-conversion law, ensuring that even informal relationships do not escape state scrutiny or vigilante action. The UCC mandates that all live-in relationships be registered with district authorities, creating another hurdle for individuals’ right to a relationship of their choice. Requirements include providing official documentation, seeking approval from religious or ‘community’ leaders, and notifying family members—all intensifying societal surveillance and threats against the couples involved.
In many cases, the women themselves have denied coercion, yet authorities proceeded with legal action, reflecting the deeply patriarchal assumption that women lack agency in choosing their own partners. Court cases in states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh have further entrenched this logic, treating interfaith love as inherently suspect, and requiring couples to prove their intentions to the state before they can be together.
Disturbingly, these laws do not operate in isolation. These laws have emboldened far-right vigilante groups to justify action against interfaith couples, particularly in cases involving Hindu-Muslim relationships. According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), anti-conversion laws in India “enable harassment, vigilante violence, and discrimination against religious minorities.” Reports of young couples being attacked, harassed, or forcibly separated have become disturbingly common especially in the north-Indian states. The law, instead of protecting these individuals, provides legal cover for such extrajudicial interventions, often with police complicity.
In this climate, the autonomy of every adult woman who chooses to cohabit or marry across faith lines, whether through conversion or otherwise, is subject to relentless scrutiny and the threat of violence. Far from safeguarding women’s rights, these enactments position the state as a partner to far-right vigilantes, reinforcing a paternalistic worldview that treats women as incapable of independent decision-making. By framing women as easily coerced or manipulated, the laws strip them of agency while simultaneously placing interfaith relationships under siege, with Muslim men disproportionately targeted and criminalized.
Under the guise of protection, Hindu nationalism is eroding women’s most fundamental freedom: the right to choose their own partners. These anti-conversion laws reduce adult women to perpetual minors whose romantic decisions must be vetted by the state. As India’s democratic institutions bend to this authoritarian impulse, it becomes clear that these laws are not safeguards but instruments of religious nationalism; tools designed to police intimacy, criminalize love, and sacrifice women’s agency at the altar of ideology.
(Sabah Gurmat is an independent journalist and writer based in New Delhi.)