NEW DELHI, Oct 25 (AFP): When a Hindu woman tearfully claimed to national media recently she had been kidnapped, raped and forcibly converted to Islam, India's religious hardliners seized the chance to hike their "love jihad" fears.
Hardline Hindu activists, encouraged by the media attention, claimed scores of Muslim boys were attempting to abduct, seduce and elope with Hindu girls across the country for the sole purpose of conversion.
On websites and leaflets, right-wing groups warned India's Hindu majority of the "dangers", and a senior government minister called for talks between religious leaders "to find a solution to the issue".
Last week, the woman, from northern Uttar Pradesh state, sensationally retracted her claims, saying she had in fact been pressured by her family to concoct the story.
But hardliners remain adamant that Muslims, numbering about 150 million in India, have a secret strategy to turn the secular country of 1.25 billion into their own.
"Of course the girl is being forced to give false statements," Vinod Bansal, a spokesman for the radical Vishwa Hindu Parishad outfit, told AFP of the woman's retraction.
"Our police systems are so weak that women find it tough to open up on how they are being tortured by Muslim men," Bansal said, claiming he knew of at least 10 "love jihad" cases in New Delhi alone.
Hindu activists like Bansal have been emboldened since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist party stormed to power at elections in May after 10 years of rule by the centre-left Congress party.
Modi, who himself has deep roots in the Hindu grassroots Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) organisation, has tried to allay fears among religious minorities of marginalisation under his right-wing administration.
And certainly moderate, mainstream Hindus dismiss "love jihad" as a ridiculous conspiracy theory. But experts warn efforts by hardliners to divide India along religious lines risk fuelling animosity between its many faiths.
"Some people are trying to polarise the country along communal lines," political and social commentator Paranjoy Guha Thakurta told AFP.
"It will be most unfortunate if those who are in power and their supporters allow it to happen (because) it is bound to inflame Hindu-Muslim tensions in the country," he said.
Police said the 20-year-old woman from Uttar Pradesh, the scene of deadly communal violence last year, had eloped with her Muslim lover.
With inter-faith relationships considered taboo in some parts of India, she had originally felt pressured in August to claim rape and conversion.
Local politicians seized on the false claims during state by-elections last month in a bid to polarise voters along communal lines, before she finally reversed her story.
"She said she was being threatened by her own family (into making the false claims)," said Onkar Singh, police superintendent of Meerut city.
The term "love jihad" first gained traction in India in 2009 when Hindu extremist Janajagruti Samiti claimed some 30,000 women in southern Karnataka state had been converted to Islam.
