The arc of the controversy has startlingly contemporary resonances. On July 28, 1967, Parmeshwari Handoo, a sales representative at the government-run Apna Bazar in Srinagar, married her Muslim co-worker Ghulam Rasool Kanth. Eight days earlier, the Kashmiri Pandit woman had converted to Islam and taken a new name, Parveen Akhtar. The love marriage set off a storm in the state. Unlike in the recent Hadiya case, where the High Court annulled the marriage of a Hindu woman from Kerala who converted to Islam and later got married to a Muslim…
Read MoreNot jihad, but love: The Hindu-Muslim marriage that brought Kashmir to a halt in 1967
