The Wire’s Arfa Khanum claims the term Love Jihad is ‘insult’ to choice and autonomy of Hindu women: Here’s how she is gaslighting Hindus for opposing Islamist predatory crimes

‘Love Jihad’, this term has, over the years, transitioned from being an alarm against an Islamist conspiracy, dismissed by Islamo-leftists as a BJP-peddled hoax, communal propaganda, and whatnot. In a fresh bid to whitewash this widespread menace, Arfa Khanum Sherwani of the leftist propaganda website The Wire has come up with a shrewd form of denialism that shields the perpetrators of serious sexual crimes and radicalism, and gaslights Hindu victims. In an X post published on 21st April, Arfa Khanum Sherwani described the term Love Jihad as “a profound insult to the dignity and intelligence of Hindu women”. She framed the issue as “communal propaganda” meant to “control women” and strip them of their autonomy. “The idea of “Love Jihad” is a profound insult to Hindu women-their dignity&intelligence. It assumes they’re incapable of making their own choices &need saviours. It is a direct attack on women’s autonomy. More than communal propaganda,its abt controlling women not protecting them,” Sherwani wrote. On the face of it, it might seem that Arfa Khanum Sherwani is defending the autonomy of Hindu women; in reality, however, she is providing intellectual cover for a documented pattern of deception, grooming, rape, blackmail, and coerced conversion to Islam, colloquially described as Love Jihad. Arfa, whose own religion does not allow Muslim women to travel without male Mehram or ‘saviour’, knows this very well that the issue is not about Hindu men forcing themselves as saviours of Hindu women or adult women’s choices but about refusing to acknowledge when those ‘choices’ are engineered via predatory tactics of the Hindu-hating Islamic fanatics who at individual and organisational level feign love and even fake their religious identity to trap Hindu women. With one post, Arfa flipped the entire narrative around Love Jihad to cast doubts on Hindu women instead. This essentially amounts to victim-blaming and emboldening rape jihadi predators, and not defending the autonomy and dignity of Hindu women. While Arfa Khanum Sherwani decorated her post with terms like ‘dignity’, ‘intelligence’, ‘choice’ and ‘autonomy’, she has used a twisted logic that is in the realms of “,Murderer toh crime Karega hi tum kyun apni body lekar baahar ghoom rahe (Murderer will commit the murder, why are you walking out with your body). Arfa, who forgets to preach about ‘choice’ when Muslim girls, even those as young as five years of age, are made to wear Burqa and Hijab to appear ‘modest’, attempted to frame the issue of Love Jihad as Hindu men restricting Hindu women from making the ‘choice’ of entering a relationship with Muslim men. Basically, she villainised Hindu men as disgruntled control freaks in an issue wherein Muslim men use predatory and deceptive tactics to lure Kafir women, manipulate them, sexually abuse them and force them to convert to Islam. The Wire’s Islamist propagandist is now pretending to care about the dignity and autonomy of Hindu women, however, not too long ago, Arfa attempted to cast aspersions on the integrity of Hindu women who accused their six Muslim colleagues at a BPO unit of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in Nashik, of workplace harassment, constant insulting commentary on Hinduism, sexual abuse, coercion to convert to Islam, offer namaz and eat beef.  “A new wave of targeting Muslims- not the paan vendor or street hawker this time, but the educated, skilled, employed. The aim is clear: make even the few who’ve secured jobs in this majoritarian system unemployable,” Sherwani posted. Arfa essentially insinuated that the Hindu women who came forward and filed complaints against their Muslim colleagues over workplace harassment and coercion for conversion to Islam were lying. She suggested that Hindu women working at the TCS Nashik office are so hateful towards Muslims that they ‘targeted’ Muslim colleagues to ensure they become “unemployable”. An Islamist woman who shoves the Muslim victimhood bogey in a crime as serious as sexual harassment and coercion for conversion to Islam by discrediting the harrowing accounts of Hindu women, can be anything but someone who genuinely cares about the dignity, autonomy and choices of Hindu women. Where did the term ‘Love Jihad’ come from? Not from Hindus, but from Christian church in Kerala because girls were being targeted and brainwashed to join ISIS While Arfa and her Islamo-leftist ilk conveniently frame Love Jihad as a Hindu hardliner-peddled ‘conspiracy theory’ to villainise Muslim men and extract electoral benefits for the BJP out of it, the term ‘Love Jihad’ itself was not invented by ‘Hindutvavadis’. It was first flagged by Christians in Kerala. It was in the late 2000s that the Syro-Malabar Church and Kerala Catholic Bishops’ Council raised alarms after Muslim men were found to be luring Christian girls into their love and manipulation trap, converting them to Islam and in some cases even trafficking them to Syria and Afghanistan to join the Islamic terror group ISIS as sex slaves or jihadi recruits. Later, several Christian outfits came forward and echoed the concerns raised by Hindu organisations, which said that there are forces active in Kerala that are targeting young women, brainwashing them in the name of ‘religious studies’, forcefully converting them to Islam and then shipping them off to serve for ISIS as sex slaves. Back then, Fr Varghese Vallikkatt, the spokesperson for the Kerala Catholic Bishops Council (KCBC), had stated that the government ignoring the cases of Love Jihad and not taking action is nothing but a ‘silent sanction’. In 2016, cases of systematic love jihad were reported in the media. In July 2016, Mini Vijayan, a military official, alleged that her daughter Aparna had been forcefully converted to Islam. Aparna was traced to Sathyasarani, or the Markazul Hidaya Educational and Charitable Trust in Malappuram. Aparna later appeared before the court and claimed to have converted to Islam and that she did not wish to go back to her mother. It turned out that Aparna had married an auto-driver named Aashiq from Malappuram. Investigations revealed that the literature from fugitive Islamic hate preacher Zakir Naik’s Islamic Research Foundation was widely used to brainwash and radicalise Hindu girls. In another case involving a Hindu girl named Nimisha, in 2011, Kerala police arrested two persons named Sheena Farzana and Naser, two alleged ‘handlers’ who were recruiting young girls in Kerala to go and ‘work’ for ISIS in Yemen. They were both from Sathyasarani, an organisation run by the now-outlawed Islamist jihadist outfit PFI. Investigations led to the discovery of several other targeted conversions. Nimisha, alongside 21 other Hindu girls, converted to Islam and married Muslim men who were recruited by the Islamic terrorist group ISIS. The Islamo-leftists like Arfa Khanum Sherwani and the Muslim-appeasing political parties have long been trivialising the menace of love jihad/rape jihad/grooming jihad as a ‘hoax’, ‘fiction’, and ‘BJP-RSS conspiracy theory’ despite there being ample evidence and thousands of cases across the country. Apparently, that it is why films like The Kerala Story are dismissed by them as ‘Islamophobic propaganda’. Beawar exploitation scandal and Ajmer case In February 2025, a disturbing case of sexual exploitation of minor Hindu girls by a Muslim grooming gang in Rajasthan’s Beawar district was reported. The Beawar police busted a gang of illiterate Muslim youths, Rehan Mohammad (20), Sohail Mansuri (19), Lukman (20), Arman Pathan (19), Sahil Qureshi (19), and two minors who were trapping school-going Hindu girls, raping them, and forcing them to convert to Islam. These men were teaching Hindu girls about namaz, roza, and reciting the Kalma (Islamic declaration of faith). Furthermore, they were pressuring the girls to wear burqas, perform namaz, observe Roza (fast), visit Maulvis and brainwash them for conversion to Islam.  One of the Hindu victims even revealed that the rape Jihadis had rate cards for Hindu women based on their caste, with Brahmin girls fetching the maximum amount. “They (Muslim perpetrators) once told me that a Brahmin girl would fetch ₹20 lakh if sold, and you (a Dalit) would get ₹10 lakh,” she said. This grooming Jihad scandal was a redux of the 1992 Ajmer rape jihad, one of India’s most infamous grooming gang cases. Over several years, a group led by Farooq Chishti and Nafees Chishti, who were members of the Khadim families of the Ajmer Sharif Dargah, preyed on 100s of school and college-going Hindu girls aged 11-20. The Khadims claim to be the descendants of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti. The perpetrators, some of whom were Youth Congress leaders, took the victims to remote farmhouses under false pretences, raped them and photographed them to further blackmail and exploit them. The Muslim groomers used the explicit images of their victims to blackmail the girls into bringing in more girls, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of abuse. In the recent months alone, multiple Muslim conversion rackets have been busted by the police. In 2025, a Muslim Maulana Jalaluddin, aka Chhangur Baba, was found to be running a vast Islamic conversion racket across Balrampur and neighbouring districts in Uttar Pradesh. Receiving foreign funding, Chhangur and his Jihadi gang were brainwashing and forcing Hindu girls to Islam through torture and other tactics. More recently, a sexual exploitation and conversion jihad gang operating at a TCS office in Maharashtra’s Nashik was exposed. The grooming jihad syndicate comprised of six Muslim men and a woman named Nida Khan, who systematically harassed Hindu female colleagues, constantly insulted and ridiculed the Hindu faith, hurled sexual innuendos, raped, force-fed beef, and threatened and forced them to convert to Islam. OpIndia reported earlier how not only Arfa Khanum Sherwani but the entire Islamo-leftist ecosystem came forward to whitewash the TCS grooming jihad scandal, coming up with a Muslim victimhood narrative, ‘it’s a case of relationship gone wrong’, victim-blaming, and other such evasive propaganda. Hindu women have been exploited by Islamic jihadi perpetrators from Amravati to Ajmer and Beawar to Bhopal, Kerala to Nashik, through coordinated conspiracies that also offer substantial financial rewards to the perpetrators. Despite this, Arfa and her ilk have the audacity to evoke the dignity, intelligence and autonomy of Hindu women while essentially casting doubt on their dignity, intelligence and autonomy. Arfa shrewdly planted doubt about the integrity and character Hindu women while also villainising Hindu men in a widespread and systematic sexual abuse and religious coercion crime wherein Kafir-hating Muslims are the perpetrators. While Islamo-Leftists keep whitewashing cases of Love Jihad, the pattern of systemic targeting and sexual exploitation of non-Muslim women is not limited to India alone. Grooming gangs of UK: Where vulnerable non-Muslim underage girls were targeted, raped and exploited for years by Pakistani gangs In the United Kingdom, Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs have been targeting White Christian and other non-Muslim girls, especially minors, for over three decades. In the late 90s, young girls, some as young as 11, were picked up, raped, beaten, sold, and even killed by grooming gangs or rape gangs for a full forty years. In Rotherham alone, it was found that 1,400 children had been sexually abused over 16 years by British Pakistani Muslim men. From Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, to many other cities in the UK, Muslim rape jihadis operated on the same modus operandi as reported in the grooming Jihad cases in India’s Ajmer, Beawar, and Kerala, etc. If India has Arfa and the Islamo-leftist coterie to downplay, whitewash, segregate grooming or rape jihad crime from its Islamic drivers, blame victims, the UK has its own London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who covered up grooming gangs run by his coreligionists in the city. The fears of appearing Islamophobic and racially insensitive prevented UK authorities and even courts from effectively acting against Pakistani Muslim groomers/rapists for years, and the Muslim-appeasing political parties of the United Kingdom also ensured that the Muslim community remains sacrosanct to criticism, even as members of this community, especially those of Pakistani origins, continued to sexually abuse White and other non-Muslim girls. OpIndia has documented hundreds of cases wherein Muslim men faked their religious identity by pretending to be Hindu to cover up their Islamist motives and employ drugs and sextortion tactics to force their religion on Hindu women.