New Delhi: Bareilly was in the news this week. Not for its jhumka or barfi. A birthday cake was being cut. Friends were laughing. Then a dozen men stormed in, fists flying, slogans rising, and the room turned into a courtroom without a judge, jury, or law.
On trial was the freedom to pick your friends.
This is a story about permission—who has it, who grants it, and who is increasingly denied it in India today.
In Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly, a 22-year-old woman did nothing radical. She invited several friends to a cafe for her birthday. Two of them happened to be Muslim men. That was enough to justify violence, public humiliation, and a social media trial under the now-familiar banner of “love jihad”. The allegation did not need evidence; the optics were sufficient.
What followed was an assault on two young men, harassment of a group of students, and the criminalisation of ordinary social life—of birthdays, friendships, photographs, and presence.
This is not new. Just a couple of months ago in Uttarakhand, women were stopped from participating in a beauty pageant after objections over ‘culture’ and ‘values’. Different state, different setting, same logic: Public spaces must be policed, women must be questioned for their choices, and religion must sit at the centre of that explanation.
The most chilling part of the UP woman’s account is the aftermath of this disruption. She is indoors now, afraid to step out. Ashamed, she says, not of her attackers, but of the attention. This is how intimidation works: the victim shrinks, while the vigilante expands.
Also read: ‘Students skipping classes for love jihad in parks’: Faridabad education dept’s letter to schools
The many faces of the vigilante
The vigilante takes many different forms. My closest friend is a Muslim. Her grandmother is Christian. Her father is Muslim. Her mother is Hindu. Her parents had an arranged marriage in the 1990s, at a time when interfaith unions existed without needing hashtags, police complaints, or moral guardians.
No mobs arrived to verify intent. No one demanded to know who was “converting” whom. Family histories were complicated, porous, and ordinary—just like India itself.
And yet someone asked me a question: “How do you get along so well with her? Is she from the same caste as you?”
That question did not come from a vigilante. It came from someone educated, urban, well-meaning. Which is precisely the point.
The policing of religion, caste, and women in India begins with curiosity framed as concern, with identity inquiries disguised as social instinct. Vigilantes simply act out what society has already normalised.
This is why friendships now invite suspicion. Why women’s movements require justification. Why presence itself becomes provocative.
Also read: Uttarakhand hotels are turning away interfaith couples. Their fear—raids by ‘love jihad’ vigilantes
When every interaction is evidence
A basic question still lingers as incidents like this become increasingly common: Who authorised these men? Not the woman’s parents, who knew her friends. Not society, which pretends to value harmony. Certainly not the law.
And yet, they walked in with total confidence, certain that the burden of explanation would fall not on them, but on the young woman and her Muslim friends. Certain that the video would circulate, the outrage would be noisy but brief, and consequences, if any, would be selective.
This is where the “love jihad” discourse does its most insidious work. It is not about love, nor conversion. It is about control. These men want to map women’s lives—who they speak to, sit with, laugh with. It assumes women are either naive or traitors, incapable of consent, in need of surveillance. Every interaction becomes evidence. Every friendship, a possible crime scene.
The underlying assumption is simple and brutal: Religious identity must dictate social behaviour. A Hindu woman’s proximity to a Muslim man is never neutral. It always requires scrutiny, explanation, and, if necessary, punishment.
Also read: Dehradun, Bareilly, Tamil Nadu attack—Indians are turning violent. Don’t keep blaming politics
A rehearsal of fear
Notice the inversion in the Bareilly case. The men who stormed a cafe are framed as protectors of social order. The students celebrating a birthday are treated as disruptors. Even the police response mirrors this confusion—detention of the assaulted boys for “breach of peace”, flattening the difference between attackers and those attacked, as if violence and presence are moral equivalents.
This is the ecosystem vigilantes thrive in: Moral panic and institutional hesitation.
The woman now asks a devastating question: Do I now need to choose my friends based on religion? That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the logical endpoint of this politics.
If friendship requires religious vetting, if women need ideological clearance to step into cafes, if mobs can decide which relationships are permissible, then the promise of constitutional freedom is already hollowed out, long before it is formally taken away.
What happened in Bareilly is a rehearsal; a test of how much can be normalised, how far fear can travel, how quietly young people can be pushed back into line.
Police action, arrests, denials of organisational links—these are procedural responses. But the bigger question remains unanswered: Who feels entitled to interrupt private lives in public spaces, and why?
Until that question is confronted, birthdays will continue to need security, friendships will continue to invite suspicion, and women will continue to pay the price for crimes they never committed.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)