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When a District Education Officer in Faridabad warned schools that students were bunking classes to engage in “anti-social activities” and “love jihad” in parks, it was not just a bureaucratic blunder; it revealed the country’s deep unease with love and intimacy that crosses communal boundaries. Even though the letter was withdrawn and dismissed as a “clerical error”, its language – “disturbing the social fabric and polluting the environment” – captures a familiar anxiety; that desire itself can become a threat.
Such episodes fit within a broader pattern of moral panics, where a person, group or a situation is suddenly seen as a threat to social values, causing authorities, the media and public figures to react in an extreme manner. These panics often amplify perceived risks, demand urgent actions and claim unity among experts and institutions, even when the actual threat is minimal or fictitious.
In India, such episodes of moral alarm are not new. From the nationwide outrage over a sexually graphic MMS video of two school students in 2004 to village councils in Bihar and Gujarat fining women for using mobile phones, anxieties around youth, intimacy and technology have time and again led to overblown reactions. Women, in particular, have been made bearers of this moral risk and giving them access to mobile phones and public spaces is still regarded as a threat to social order in many small towns.
Local authorities and educational institutions have also repeatedly sought to regulate how young people express affection – or more precisely, how to avoid its public display.
From Valentine’s Day raids to bans on couples meeting in public parks, these interventions are often framed as “protection” and “discipline”, but, in practice, they function as mechanisms of control – deciding who can love, where and how.
The Faridabad letter, which cautioned students against “love jihad” is a striking example of this logic. The idea of interfaith union and romance as a demographic or cultural threat in fact reduces personal relationships to issues of communal purity and national identity. What begins as a concern for disciplining students or public order turns into a tool of policing desire itself, tying everyday acts of intimacy to broader anxieties around belonging, morality and the nation.
These developments raise some pressing questions: how do young Indians navigate their desires and relationships under the pervasive influence of such social norms and political anxieties? How to they negotiate intimacy that does not align with the communal expectations?
How Indians ‘Learn to Love’ Under Watch
Following the argument of “love jihad”, which crudely claims that Muslim men are waging a war in India to lure Hindu and Christian women as part of an ongoing demographic conspiracy, love and intimacy have become entangled in a paranoid discourse of safety and purity. As state surveillance continues alongside the implementation of new anti-conversion laws and anti-polygamy bills, how many of us can ‘afford’ to find love under this watch – where desire is never just personal but also political?
At a time when the state and institutions are clearly keeping an eye on citizens’ private lives –tracking what we say, what we eat, how we live and love – young Indians are entering the space of homegrown dating apps, especially in metropolitan cities, to seek love across lines. In this matchmaking ecosystem, families and communities have little say but conversations with users also reveal how much the “love jihad” rhetoric and the larger culture of moral policing affect their everyday interactions.
I spoke to young Indians in cities to understand how these tensions surface in unexpected ways. 25-year-old Aasha*, who comes from a Brahmin family in Jaipur, described how she has been trying to match and meet people from diverse communities for more than three years now. Fatigue has begun to set in. “India does not have a very healthy dating culture”, she told me.
“And I think that needs to change. But for that to change, we need a different kind of dating experience. I think there are taboos associated with online dating as well because I know of friends who are in interfaith relationships, but they haven't told their families. They say things like, “okay, we are in love, but we don't think our parents are ready to accept it, so let us just “enjoy” this experience of dating someone outside our kin.”
Her comment that India lacks a healthy dating culture clearly underlines that relationships that fail to meet family expectations are rarely accepted by society. These tensions highlight taboos around dating are not just about morality or sexuality but also stem from fears of disrupting community boundaries. In this way, Aasha’s idea of a “different kind of dating experience’ is also a demand to rethink the moral and socio-political conditions that make it so difficult to love publicly and proudly India.
But here is the catch: the boundaries that users like Aasha are trying to cross in real life are actually reproduced on some of the locally available dating apps. These apps allow users to filter potential matches by religion, community, political affiliations and mother tongue. So, what looks like “choice” is just another form of digital exclusion – another way to keep these boundaries intact. For some, dating outside one’s faith or caste is seen as an act of ‘awareness’ or ‘rebellion’, but what happens when the moral policing cannot be skipped even within one’s own kinship structure?
From Rebellion to Regulation: Love, But Within 'Limits!'
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) introduced the idea of “love laws” – the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. “And how much”. These words capture how caste, religion and respectability have long been interrelated in the politics of love in India. In the novel, Ammu, a Syrian-Christian woman, and Velutha, a Dalit man, dare to love across the boundaries that the world around them says they should not cross. Their connection, which was found out and punished with devastating violence, becomes a metaphor for how cultures keep their hierarchies in place by monitoring intimacy.
The same fear that doomed Ammu and Velutha’s love resurfaces today in moral panics surrounding “love jihad”, or in everyday acts of monitoring “students’ behaviour outside classrooms engaging in ‘indecent activities’”. 27-year-old Azeem*, a designer in Bengaluru who belongs to the Malabar Muslim community in Kerala (also known as Mappilas), describes his view on interfaith relationships:
“The place where I come from is a Muslim-dominated area, and my parents are very conservative. They are involved with Jamaat-Islam-e-Hind. And, before I came to Bangalore, we had a whole argument about my belief in atheism in general. So, talking from my experience, it's going to be very difficult to move forward with an inter-caste or, specifically interfaith partner, because you're going to face a lot of resistance from your home and your society. If you're brave enough to do it, or if you have thick skin, one can go ahead. I don't think I have that courage, and I don't have the energy to do that”.
The intimacy here remains a matter of both private and public scrutiny, driven by the same social anxieties that the Faridabad DEO’s letter made visible at an institutional level. Whether it is the state invoking “love jihad” to keep an eye on interfaith couples or families warning their children not to ‘complicate’ their lives by loving someone outside the kin, both are examples of the same disciplinary logic. What does it mean to love when every choice must first be explained to a community or a government official first? The dread that punished Ammu and Velutha’s union now spreads through new channels – school circulars, dating app filters and everyday conversations that remind people that love must stay within limits.
Contrast this with 23-year-old Veena’s* “conservative” use of dating apps and her own understanding of loving within limits. She comes from a Rajput family and works for an IT company in Mumbai. She prefers to date people from her own community and expresses reservations about interfaith relationships. When I asked her how comfortable she was with exploring romance outside her community, she said:
“Well, I would not go for that. Like, this is also my personal choice, I can date a Hindu but I wouldn’t date someone outside my religion. I won’t be comfortable doing that. I think my family will not allow that in the first place. Also, I will not take that step. Even though my parents had a love marriage, they would like me to stick to the community factor. They will expect me to find a guy from my own community.” (Interview with Veena, July, 2024).
This is a classic example of how the regulation of ‘who to love’ is not only imposed by the state, but also internalised through family and community expectations.
What seems like freedom is masked under quiet submission – a self-regulation which comes from inherited fears about belonging and honour that people pass down from one generation to another.
Azeem’s hesitancy and Veena’s restraint shed light on how deeply the language of protection and purity continues to shape private life.
However, it is important to note that not all forms of love or interfaith relationships face the same scrutiny. The moral panic around “love jihad” is also a targeted political initiative that portrays Muslim men and Hindu women as more vulnerable suspects. In such unions, love is seen as a game of manipulation, and romance is conflated with conversion or even terrorism.
In the last ten years, a number of Indian states have passed “love jihad” or anti-conversion laws that allows the police to question couples and criminalise interfaith marriages. This imbalance is also supported by public discourse. In 2024, Kailash Vijayvargia, a minister in Madhya Pradesh, described “love jihad” as a conspiracy “targeting Hindu girls”, urging women to teach their daughters moral principles. Earlier this year, a Muslim man in Madhya Pradesh was attacked inside a court building while trying to register his marriage with a Hindu woman – a scene that Times of India reported as “Love jihad ruckus”. These incidents show how the state frames Hindu women as vulnerable subjects needing protection, while Muslim men are seen as threats to the nation’s moral fabric.
This fear is not limited to state institutions. One of my interviewees, 26-year-old Rani* from Hyderabad, who works in the social development sector, described how her mother’s quiet warnings echoed the same concerns:
“During my undergraduate studies, Ambedkar had inspired me, his works and, you know, the fact that if you really want to see an equitable world, then you need to find ways to fight all the issues that emerge in interfaith community, inter caste relations and inter religious equations. So, I've dated people outside my own community but I remember when I started doing well in college, my mother also alerted me that, you know, it's natural to find people you're attracted to but then ensure that you don't date somebody who is a Christian or a Muslim. And when I asked her why, she just said that you don’t want to run astray or get linked with a man who will change you after doing so well in life. And I was like, who's left in this entire dating pool then? So, to make my family uncomfortable, because I didn’t want to subscribe to that kind of a thought process, I actively started dating men outside my circle.”
Rani’s mother’s warning – wrapped in words of care and safety – is based on the same idea that drives institutional surveillance: that a woman’s freedom to choose, especially when it comes to religion, threatens the social order. What is particularly revealing in her account is how this regulation works as a form of protection. Her mother’s fear that a Muslim man may “change” her after she has “done so well in life” mirrors the same narrative that portrays Hindu women as innocent victims who need to be saved and Muslim men as controlling agents.
The policing of women’s desire, then, is not just about gender; it is also about protecting a collective identity. Rani opposes this narrative by choosing to “make her family uncomfortable” – an act of defiance. But this is a choice that she is able to make because of her position as an educated, independent woman living in urban India.
Many women, especially those from small towns, wear common feelings of care, shame and duty as signs of virtue to safeguard their own and family’s reputation. Unlike Rani, they do not have the courage or social freedom to challenge the existing moral order.
The ‘Gaze’ That Never Leaves
The Faridabad letter may have been withdrawn, but the tremors of anxiety it caused is still felt across everyday life, in schools that warn against “distractions”, on homegrown dating apps that subtly sort our matching options based on community and religion filter bubbles, and in families that remind us to love “within limits”. Surveillance may change its form, but the message remains the same: love needs to be monitored, controlled and justified.
Dating happens to be one of the many spaces where caste, community and class divisions quietly reassert themselves today, even as they are repackaged in the language of modernity, choice and freedom. What begins as a personal emotion turns into a public concern, absorbed into the nation’s moral order. And yet, people continue to reach across lines, at times silently and sometimes defiantly, searching for a connection. Perhaps this is the real story of finding love in contemporary India: learning to love under watch, to crave moments of freedom in a world full of fear. Until intimacy can escape this gaze of distrust, even the most liberated form of love will carry the weight of society's watchful eyes.
(*Names have been changed to maintain anonymity)
(Shirin Bismillah is a PhD scholar in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Roehampton, London. On the creative side, Shirin’s poems and translations have appeared in several magazines).