Bollywood and most of its divas are known for being out of touch with reality, and as a consequence, slightly delusional. A stunning display of that grand delusion was the interview of actress Pooja Bedi with Suhasini Maniratnam on the Jos Alukkas YouTube channel. In the interview, Pooja Bedi reveals that she stopped acting because her conservative Muslim in-laws did not approve of her career, yet she claims that when she married her Muslim husband, there was “secularism” and “democracy”, which seems to be missing now.
She said, “There wasn’t that much of an uproar as it is today. Today, there is this whole Love Jihad, this sentiment of Muslim and Hindu, which is so sad because when I was growing up, it was actually true democracy and truly secular in so many ways”.
In her interview, Pooja Bedi also says that her in-laws were conservative Muslims and for her to have followed her career, contrary to their wishes, would have been unfair to them. She claims that by giving her career up because of the conservative Islamic beliefs of her Muslim husband and inlaws, she was being a 100% good daughter-in-law and wife. She insisted that her in-laws would have become ‘uncomfortable’ if she had continued her career, so she gave up her career.
Perhaps she is unable to see the glaring irony in her own statement when she goes on to claim “back then, there was secularism and democracy”, insinuating that currently there is no secularism or democracy.
Indian Express omits ‘love jihad’ reference in their article based on the interview
Interestingly, an Indian Express article that is based on the same interview of Pooja Bedi has no mention of the statement she made on Love Jihad. The article describes Bedi’s statements and emphasis on being a good daughter-in-law, and even going to the extent of returning all the signing amount she had taken for all the movie offers she had got before her wedding, just so she could make her in-laws happy, but forgets to mention the part where she said, “today there is so much about this love jihad, this sentiment of being muslim and Hindu, ..which is so sad, because when I was growing up it was actually a true democracy and truly secular…”
Bedi, who was already a famous actress when she married, had the privilege of catching headlines and being the media favourite due to her career. For a successful and privileged woman to deny the existence of Love Jihad, which is the organised and systemic targeting of non-Muslim women, even minors, for conversion and sexual exploitation, even for terror recruitment, is one of the main reasons the crime continues in today’s date.
Bedi is not alone in dismissing Love Jihad as some sort of political propaganda, and the Indian Express is not the only media house to have removed its mention, to portray the ‘secular liberal’ narrative that Love Jihad doesn’t exist at all. This behaviour is as chronic ans the crime of Love Jihad itself. Not just rich and successful liberals with their PR machinery, and media houses with their narrative power, even politicians and government officials have contributed in denying the existence of the crime, and thereby enabling the perpetuation and spread of this phenomenon globally.
Bedi and the Indian Express are doing what countless politicians and government officials in the UK did, for decades, when the child victims of grooming gangs continued to be targeted and raped by Pakistani men, what the Islamic clerics, Congress-Left ecosystem did when the Catholic Church in Kerala raised the issue of targeted conversion and radicalisation of Christian girls at the hands of Muslim men, and what the woke ecosystem still does, in all the corridors of power it controls.
Love Jihad started becoming a mainstream discussion when it was revealed that young women in Kerala have been targeted, converted and sent to Syria and Afghanistan to work for ISIS. The case of the grooming gangs of the UK was suppressed for years, but with the advent of social media and Right-wing political support, the stories began to emerge. In India, countless women have been deceived, raped, assaulted and converted into Islam by Muslim men, often using false names or promises to systematically target and trap them. The TCS Nashik scandal is the latest addition in a long list of similar crimes that Pooja Bedi is trying to mock.
