MUMBAI: Rais Shaikh, the Samajwadi Party MLA from Bhiwandi constituency, has demanded the scrapping of the Interfaith Marriage Family Coordination Committee set up by the Women and Child Development (WCD) department to track alleged ‘love jihad’ cases. The legislator has written a letter to deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar and WCD minister Aditi Tatkare in this regard.
The Interfaith Marriage Family Coordination Committee was set up on December 13, 2022, by the then WCD Minister and BJP leader Mangal Prabhat Lodha. The committee was the result of several agitations by Hindutvavadi organisations who were opposed to interfaith marriage and termed the latter ‘love jihad’.
After Ajit Pawar joined the state government, the WCD department, which was with the BJP, went to the NCP. Unlike the BJP’s political agenda of Hindutva, the NCP under Ajit Pawar’s leadership has continuously claimed that it has not given up its secular ideology even after joining hands with the BJP. It is against the backdrop of this change of guard that Shaikh wrote the letter to Ajit Pawar and Aditi Tatkare.
This story was originally published in hindustantimes.com. Read the full story here .