CPI leader meets Hadiya and her family

Hadiya

Senior CPI leader Annie Raja on Wednesday visited the family of Hadiya, the Kerala woman whose conversion to Islam and now annulled marriage to a Muslim youth has pulled her family into the vortex of national attention, an experience her father Asokan said made him feel “desperate”.

Asokan, during his first interview in over four months since the case came to light, told The Indian Express on Tuesday that he had felt alienated by his own political party, the CPI, which did not help him. He said the BJP and the RSS were perhaps more forthcoming.

Raja met Hadiya’s family at T V Puram, near Vaikom in Kerala, for an hour but refused to speak about what she discussed with them. She said those supposedly trying to help Hadiya should not give up the language of engagement and resort to useless protests outside her home.

Asokan said: “They (the CPI) have come for the first time today. I welcomed them. They spent sometime with me and my wife.”

Raja, when asked about the conversations she had with the family, said: “I do not want to do what Rahul Eswar did to that family. Also, I do not want to talk anything that would eventually put that family in further trouble.”

On Tuesday, Hadiya’s father said that after the radical Muslim organisation Popular Front of India (PFI), it was Eswar, a TV-savvy Hindutva activist, who troubled the family after his daughter returned home. “It was his dirty work,” Asokan said.

“When there are unverified reports of many serious charges against the man who married her and different corners raising allegations of many such controversial marriages in Kerala, all these are putting the entire Muslim community in bad light,” she said.