In India, the last two months of 2022 were dominated by lurid media coverage of the deaths of two women. One of the women, Shraddha Walkar, was murdered by her boyfriend in Delhi. Her body had allegedly been cut up into 35 pieces, stored in a refrigerator and gradually disposed of in a forest. Walkar’s father reported her missing after her friends said her cell phone had been switched off for months. She had been murdered in May. Her boyfriend was arrested in November and is currently in judicial custody.

The second woman, Tunisha Sharma, a 20-year-old actor, allegedly hung herself on December 24 on the set of a TV show that she was working on with her boyfriend. They had apparently broken up shortly before her death. After Sharma’s death, her boyfriend was arrested for “abetment to suicide.”

What links the otherwise unconnected deaths of these two young women is that they were Hindu and their boyfriends were Muslim. Predictably, both cases were reported in the mainstream Indian media, particularly on television, as examples of “love jihad” — a right-wing conspiracy theory alleging that vulnerable Hindu women are being groomed by Muslim men and converted to Islam.   

Hindu supremacists in their saffron scarves hold a candlelight vigil for Shraddha Walkar, a young Hindu woman allegedly murdered by her Muslim boyfriend. Photo by Sam Panthaky/AFP via Getty Images.

Asif Khan, a resident of Dindori, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, married Sakshi Sahu in April. They were in their early 20s. As the news spread through their village of a Muslim man marrying a Hindu woman, local Hindutva (or Hindu nationalist) groups mobilized to “rescue” Sakshi.