Such endorsement of a full-time team to keep an eye on harassment shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Last month The Quint did an exclusive report on UP’s Bijnor district, probing how sexual harassment of girl students had contributed to the school drop-out rate of girls. The report was in wake of a violent clash that took place in September 2016, in Bijnor when an incident took a communal turn and claimed four lives. Reporting from UP just before the assembly elections, journalist Barkha Dutt had talked to a group of girl students in Lucknow University about the promised squad. The answers had ranged from welcoming it as a positive initiative to seeing shades of anti-love jihad monitoring in it. Recognising it as a measure that would help girls from all communities, one student said, “I don’t see it as a religious issue or related to love jihad. At least an initiative has been taken, these people’s duty is to take care of these crimes”. Meanwhile, ‘love jihad’ as a threat and the need for concerted action against it remain contested ideas – opinion and evidence are split, supporting rival claims of both sceptics and alarmists.