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‘There is a Hindu–Muslim couple here today for court marriage. The girl is Hindu,’ a lawyer informed Balraj Dungar over the phone. Even though it was still early in the day, Dungar’s deep-seated worries were stirred by this call. The Bajrang Dal Uttar Pradesh convenor-turned-BJP state worker rushed to his car and sped to a local court in Meerut.
Shortly after, the couple’s marriage was stopped by a group of zealous workers of the Bajrang Dal. The lawyer had done his part, and Dungar had done his.
This was in 2017, when the BJP’s Yogi Adityanath became UP’s chief minister for the first time on the back of a historic win in the assembly elections. Adityanath, believed Dungar, would finally stop love jihad in the state and show Muslims their place.
When I first interviewed Balraj Dungar in 2020, he described this incident as one of his ‘success stories’—the high point of a life dedicated to protecting Hindus. A middle-aged, round man with a giant teeka across his forehead, he saw himself as a ‘protector’ of his religion.
‘Hindus are under threat,’ Dungar declared at the very start of our conversation.
‘From whom?’ I ventured to ask.
‘From Muslims, who else?’ He shot back, stunned that the question even had to be asked. ‘If a Hindu woman marries into a Hindu home, she will give birth to two children. But if she marries into a Muslim home, she would be forced to give birth to at least ten children.’
With more than 20 crore people, roughly the entire population of Brazil, Muslims are India’s largest minority. One of the many allegations against them is that they produce too many children, which contributes to the country’s population growth and upsets the demographic balance. Right-wing Hindu politician Sakshi Maharaj from Unnao even claimed in 2015 that Hindus needed to outnumber Muslims by having at least four children.
According to the United Nations, India overtook China as the world’s most populous country in 2023. Several calls for population control policies have come from right-wing quarters who see this in a Hindu–Muslim binary and say that India’s Muslim population will eventually, if unchecked, outnumber the Hindu population.
S.Y. Quraishi, a former chief election commissioner of India, refuted this claim in his book The Population Myth: Islam, Family Planning and Politics in India published in 2021, claiming that Muslims would never be able to surpass Hindus in population.
In an interview I conducted with Quraishi in 2021, he told me, ‘While Muslims have the lowest levels of family planning as well as the highest fertility rate due to poverty and other factors, Hindus are not far behind. They have the second-highest fertility rate. The truth is, both communities are backward according to indicators of family planning.’
While Muslims have the highest fertility rate in India, it has seen the sharpest decline over the past few decades. According to data from the National Family Health Survey, the total fertility rate has declined dramatically among Muslims, falling from 4.4 children per woman in 1992 to 2.6 children in 2015 to 2.3 in 2021.7 In fact, as a result of greater access to family planning facilities and education, birth rates have been falling for all communities in India in recent decades.
Dungar doesn’t buy it. ‘In the end, the country’s Muslim population will rise and Hindus will be reduced to a minority.’
Since the anti-conversion law was enacted in Uttar Pradesh in 2021, Dungar and his vigilante network have the police’s full backing in their efforts to sabotage interfaith unions.
The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021 was introduced by the Uttar Pradesh government in November 2020 and enacted in March 2021. By end-2021, a slew of BJP-ruled including Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka, had enacted similar laws. Haryana followed in 2022, Rajasthan in 2025 and Maharashtra in 2026—the thirteenth Indian state to regulate religious conversions—giving state sanction to what had long been considered a fringe theory.
However, the epicentre of this non-existent threat remains UP—home to 3.85 crore Indian Muslims (Census 2011 data)10 and frequently the site11 of communal conflict. The BJP’s loaded rhetoric since coming to power in 2017 has made divisions deeper in an already troubled society. The love jihad laws may thus seem to be a direct consequence of the current dispensation’s prejudices but, in reality, they were the result of years of labour put in by the soldiers of Hindutva.
Organizations like the Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other RSS affiliates have worked tirelessly for decades to popularize the idea that Muslim men ‘lure’ Hindu women into marriage with the ultimate aim of increasing the Muslim population in the country. And now with legal backing, there is nothing holding them back.
