A top court’s refusal to intervene in the marriage of a Christian woman to a Muslim man has brought the curtain down on a snowballing controversy in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
The father of Jyotsna Mary Joseph, who worked as a nurse in Saudi Arabia, had filed a habeas corpus petition in Kerala High Court seeking a probe into his daughter’s “dis-appearance” after she walked out on her family and married Shejin, a communist youth leader belonging to the Muslim community, without their con-sent. The family leveled charges of suspected “love jihad,” a conspiracy theory that accuses Muslim men of targeting women from other religions for conversion to Islam by means of marriage, deception and force.
But the high court division bench of Justice V.G. Arun and Justice C.S. Sudha on April 19 declined to interfere in the couple’s decision to marry and disposed of the father’s petition. The court arrived at a decision after Jyostna appeared before it and categorically stated that she had married Shejin of her own free will and not under any compulsion.