| Summary/Abstract |
This paper examines moral panics about love jihad in contemporary India. Since 2009, right-wing Hindu activists have alleged that members of the Muslim community are conspiring to marry Hindu women, convert them to Islam, and have Muslim children. Love jihad, according to these activists, threatens to both make Hindus a minority and, consequently, undermine the Hindu religion. I argue that moral panics about love jihad not only serve to marginalize Muslims as ‘bad citizens,’ but also promotes the gendered moral obligations of the Hindu patriarchal family as civic duty. I consider the ways that the citizen family imagined by anti-love jihad activists complicates some contemporary theorizations of the individualized political subject promoted by neo-liberal governance.
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