The arc of the controversy has startlingly contemporary resonances.
Hilal Mir
On July 28, 1967, Parmeshwari Handoo, a sales representative at the government-run Apna Bazar in Srinagar, married her Muslim co-worker Ghulam Rasool Kanth. Eight days earlier, the Kashmiri Pandit woman had converted to Islam and taken a new name, Parveen Akhtar. The love marriage set off a storm in the state.
Unlike in the recent Hadiya case, where the High Court annulled the marriage of a Hindu woman from Kerala who converted to Islam and later got married to a Muslim man, the tale of Handoo and Kanth had a happier ending. The case against the couple didn’t go anywhere.
But half a century later, the Akhtar-Kanth case makes for an interesting study. Startlingly, it bears many markings of the politics that currently inform the Sangh Parivar’s bogey of love jihad – the term used by Hindutva groups to accuse Muslim men of entrapping Hindu women on the pretext of love in order to eventually convert them to Islam.
Police complaint
Eight days after the Akhtar-Kanth wedding in 1967, her mother registered a complaint with the police that her minor daughter was missing and had probably been abducted by a colleague for “immoral purposes”. A case was registered against Kanth. A day later, Akhtar appeared at Srinagar’s Jama Masjid to announce her conversion and appealed to the congregation for support.
The police eventually detained the couple at a police station, where Akhtar’s mother, maternal uncle and a few Kashmiri Pandit elders attempted to talk her out of the marriage. Akhtar’s father had died some time before.
Akhtar was then separated from Kanth and taken to another police station where a group of Kashmiri Pandits led by Triloki Nath Dhar – who was then the president of the Kashmir branch of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (the future Bharatiya Janata Party) – was allowed to meet her twice. Akhtar’s mother and uncle were allowed to stay with her at the police station.
The police released the couple a few days later after establishing that she was an adult and after Akhtar insisted that she had got married of her own free will.
Inter-religious marriages
Before the Akhtar-Kanth marriage, two high-profile marriages involving Kashmiri Muslim men and Kashmiri Pandit women had merely set tongues wagging. Communal tensions had not been not stoked either when a Muslim woman from an elite, conservative Naqshbandi family married a Sikh in the late 1940s, or when a Muslim woman married a Kashmiri Pandit lawyer.
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