New Delhi

This is the story of Hadiya, currently the most famous woman in India. Like any person of modest profile rocketed into national headlines, she’d rather be leading an anonymous life. But her parents—and the Supreme Court of India—will not let her.

Hadiya, a medical student, was born 25 years ago into a Hindu family in the southern state of Kerala. In 2015 she converted to Islam, and last year she married a Muslim man. In the process, she changed her Hindu given name from Akhila Ashokan to the adoptive Muslim Hadiya.

Her parents, appalled by the decision, urged the courts to annul her marriage in December 2016. They contended that she had converted to Islam under duress. Worse, they alleged that their daughter’s husband, Shafin Jahan, was involved in terrorism and intended to traffic her to Syria.

In a judgment that was startling in its paternalism and sexism, the Kerala High Court annulled Hadiya’s marriage, holding that she could not possibly have converted and married of her own free will. There had to have been brainwashing and “indoctrination.” Exercising its parens patriae jurisdiction—which gives it power to safeguard a citizen deemed unable to protect herself—the court ordered Hadiya, then 24, to move in with her parents. It also barred her husband from contacting her.


The court described Hadiya’s professed interest in Islam as “out of the ordinary,” since “the normal youth is indifferent towards religion and religious studies.” The judges observed that she was “not a very bright student” and concluded that her conversion to Islam after “merely attending a [religious] course of two months’ duration” was not credible. The court added—with no supporting evidence—that “she has no idea as to what she wants in life.” In other words, she was too stupid to convert freely.

Hadiya’s husband appealed the annulment of the marriage to India’s Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. Yet at the same time, the court ordered the country’s antiterrorist agency to investigate the husband’s political activities. The government contends, without offering incriminating evidence, that he is a Muslim radical. But the agency’s involvement—and its incendiary assertion that Hadiya’s is a case of “psychological kidnapping”—has helped to feed a growing hysteria about religious conversions.

Hindu fundamentalists have alleged that Muslim men are waging a “love jihad,” in which they lure gullible Hindu women into marriage and conversion to Islam. Prominent members of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party—which is pro-Hindu and nationalist—use the phrase freely, as they rage against an imagined demographic terrorism being waged to increase Muslim numbers in Hindu-majority India.

The Supreme Court of India did Hadiya no favors last week. The bench had to be shamed by her lawyers into even granting her the chance to speak in court, and then proceeded to ignore her assertions. “I want to go with my husband, nobody forced me to convert,” she said in open court. For their part, the judges spoke of the need to “deprogram” her.


The court, which had ruled only three months ago that privacy was the fundamental right of every Indian citizen, proceeded to ignore its own landmark judgment. It effectively held that Hadiya has no right to privacy—or autonomy. Instead it has offered its own brand of paternalism, transferring Hadiya’s guardianship from her father to the principal of her medical college. Anyone seeking to meet Hadiya, including her husband, now needs her principal’s permission.

The Hadiya case has drawn attention to two ugly problems in Indian society. The first is the unabashed infantilization of women by its official institutions. The Kerala High Court, in its judgment ordering Hadiya to return to her parents, wrote: “[She] is the only child of her parents. There are no other persons in this world who would consider the welfare and well-being of their daughter to be of paramount importance than her parents.” They wrote this referring to an adult woman.

The second problem is the profound Hindu paranoia about religious conversion. For many centuries before the arrival of the British, Hindus of the lower castes converted to Islam in massive numbers to escape an oppressive religious hierarchy. Under the British, and even after independence, many hundreds of thousands converted to Christianity for the same reasons. Hindu revivalists today see an opportunity for a great and glorious reversal of that demographic loss. This has made them aggressively defensive of their faith, and of “their” people. Hadiya is but a pawn in their game.

Mr. Varadarajan is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.