In her work on early 20th century Hindi popular media, historian Charu Gupta talks about how the new, cheap mass media of print magazines and novels brought into public view, diverse accounts of transgressive love—elopements of inter-caste/faith love, bhabi-dewar love and same-sex relationships among them. Bestselling among the public, they also aroused moral panic among some elite Hindu men. As Gupta writes, “Here, romance, elopements and conversions easily slipped into the rhetoric of abduction… a proliferation of popular inflammatory and demagogic appeals, as never before, based on stories of atrocities against Hindu women, ranging from allegations of rape, aggression and abduction, to luring, conversion and forced marriage by Muslim males.”

The newly passed ‘anti-conversion’ law in UP, is similarly, the climax of a wild-eyed propaganda campaign featuring anti-Romeo squads and love jihad; a conservative, fundamentalist desire to suppress and control a growing openness in intimate and social life, which constantly bursts forth on the new medium of our times—the Internet, including the now banned Tik Tok.