“The Judge once again asked, ‘Since you are 18 years old, your decision is crucial, Amina do you want to go with your mother who had looked after you for 18 years or you want to live with this boy whom you met just some time ago?”
The message then rambles on and on about the girl and her lack of loyalty to her mother who brought her up despite abject poverty.
“She decided to live with Manoj, whose love was greater for her than her mother’s. While her mother fainted in the courtroom she walked away happily with Manoj,” it ends on a dramatic note.
The fact is, no one knows whether Amina or Manoj exist or whether any judge actually asked the girl why she was choosing her lover over her mother.
But the message in Malayalam, has been doing rounds on social media for last few days with pictures of different couples.
The first installment of the message without a picture attachment became popular among Muslim groups.
Religious Ritual to Circulate Communal Tension?
Later, it reappeared with the wedding photo of Babumon and Naseera, a couple who recently got married in Nilambur. Their inter-faith marriage in spite of objections had become big news as their love story resembled that of the iconic Moideen-Kanjanamala love story.
It has become a religious ritual for some to circulate the emotional message with pictures of any other inter-religious marriages they stumbled upon.
During the last two three days, the message has been taking rounds with a photograph of a teenage boy and girl in Hijab. The girl has been subject to vile abuses on the internet as people automatically assumed she was ‘Amina’ who had eloped with a Hindu boy Manoj abandoning her mother.
An exasperated cousin of the boy in the pictures has pleaded people not to target the two and that they were classmates.
This news is a complete lie. I was shocked seeing this post. The boy in the photograph is my cousin. First of all he is not a Hindu, he is a Muslim. He was 17 years old and the photo was taken during a school function with his classmate. Someone has misused the photograph. Then the ‘community’ lovers enthusiastically started sharing it.Sabith Muhhamed, Senior Resident, Thiruvananthapuram Medical College
Muhhamed wrote in a Facebook group Freethinkers.
The people who share these are destroying the future of two innocent young kids. Her mother cried and fainted, not because of the reason said in the post, but because of this fake news. People can do the worst things to create rivalry among human beings and that is scary.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)