Countering Falsehoods / Discourses Of Power: Love Jihad and Other Fictions
03.13.2024 | 5 - 6:30 PM | 10 Stephens Hall (ISAS Conference Room)
with CRG's Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence, Sreenivasan Jain (Journalist, Broadcaster, and Co-author of Love Jihad and Other Fictions: Simple Facts to Counter Viral Falsehoods),
in conversation with Angana P. Chatterji (UC Berkeley)
and Leti Volpp (UC Berkeley School of Law).
Sreenivasan Jain is a CRG Distinguished Journalist-In-Residence, broadcaster, and co-author of Love Jihad and Other Fictions: Simple Facts to Counter Viral Falsehoods. In a career spanning three decades, he has reported on wars, elections, insurgencies, majoritarianism, and corruption scandals for the television network NDTV where he worked till early 2023. His investigative work and ground reportage have been recognized by the Ramnath Goenka Awards, Red Ink Awards, and New York Festivals, among others.
In Love Jihad and Other Fictions: Simple Facts to Counter Viral Falsehoods, the authors interrogate some theories that are part of the landscape of WhatsApp chats and social media feeds of millions of Indians every day. Starting with the first known case of ‘love jihad’, the authors investigate arguably the only definitive list of ‘love jihad’ cases. They travel to the state where the largest number of arrests have been made under new anti-love jihad laws to explore if the crackdown is justified. The book also explores ‘population jihad’—the claim that Muslims are waging a holy war by producing more children—under the scanner.
The authors crunch the numbers and trawl through parliamentary records to decode whether Muslims will indeed outnumber over a billion Hindus in the near future. They scrutinize the Hindutva claim of a sinister Christian scheme to take over India through mass forced conversions. The book also examines the theory of Muslim appeasement, probing assertions like unequal availability of electricity on Diwali and Eid, the hajj subsidy, funds to madrasas, and the favorite bugbear of the Hindu Right: Muslim men being able to take up to four wives.
Event co-sponsored with the Institute for South Asia Studies, Center for Right-Wing Studies, Stanford Center for South Asia, and the South Asian Journalist Association.