There was a Sikh man who married a Muslim woman. They practised their own religions, had no children, grew old and then one day, the wife passed away. Since she had been a Muslim all her life, the Sikh husband insisted on seeing her buried with religious rites. How could he cremate her? She had been a Muslim till her last breath.

He went from one Muslim graveyard to another, and each one refused. Once she had married a non-Muslim, they said, she was no longer a Muslim.

So the Sikh man had her buried without religious rites under a tree near his house. Then, the Sikh man died too. One day, an unemployed man saw this unidentified grave under a tree and put a green chadar over it. Some incense sticks were lit. Soon people started asking the grave for blessings and left coins. The unemployed man thus became a Sufi fakir. A neighbour who could see what was happening confronted the fraud fakir. The fakir replied, "Why don’t you just let me be? It’s my living."

Whether this story is true, and whether the politics of “love jihad” wins Amit Shah votes, the truth is that marrying across caste, class and religion in this country meets grave disapproval.

I don’t share the politics of “love jihad,” but I must say the liberal response to it has been naive: Why is the Hindu right afraid of love? Why are they raising the bogey of Muslim men wooing Hindu women to increase Muslim numbers in the population? Why are they being so patriarchal? Don’t such Hindu women have choice and agency? The numbers of such marriages are so small, what are they worried about? What about Hindu men marrying Muslim women?

Those (very valid) questions pretend that inter-religious inter-caste marriages are socially acceptable in this country. They are not. It is the widespread social disapproval that right-wing politicians will obviously exploit it for votes. They have been doing so since the 1920s.

I have known of families disowning their daughters because they married a Muslim. I have known of Muslim families not accepting their men marrying non-Muslim women unless they converted to Islam. The truth about communities living peacefully in India is that they do so without “roti-beti ka rishta”, without dining with or marrying among each other. We know, don't we, that families kill their own daughters for such things.

Even when an Indian Muslim (Sania Mirza) was marrying a Pakistani Muslim (Shoaib Malik), Indians and Pakistanis were at their patriarchal worst. (Some) Pakistanis behaved as though they had stolen some gold from our house, and (some) Indians behaved as though we had lost something.

Yet I have also known of people of different religions married to each other with no one having any objections. What separates these people from the ones who worry about “love jihad” and conversion is that they are people who don’t let organised religion rule their lives. Modernity makes us have roti-beti ka rishta from anyone regardless of their caste and religion labels.

The real problem here, one that we must not hesitate to point out, is religion. Religion, like caste and other such identities, divides us. Said Baba Bulleh Shah, “Masjid dha de, Mandir dha de, dha de jo kucch dainda / Par kisi da dil na dhain, Rab dilaan vich rehnda.” Demolish the mosque, demolish the temple, demolish whatever can be demolished. But don’t break someone’s heart, God lives there.