An unjust war: ‘Love Jihad’ and honour killings are strategies to quell challenges to caste, class and gender conventions

During his tenth class exam, the one thing that had pushed Faisal to study hard was his father's promise to buy him a cellphone that would "click pictures, play music and have WhatsApp", if he did well. When the exam results came in, he and his father, Shauqat, headed straight to the local mobile shop and bought Faisal's first smartphone – a cheap Chinese one since that was all Shauqat, a carpenter, could afford to buy.

Tall, curly haired, 15-year-old Faisal lived in Sarai Kale Khan, an early 19th-century settlement in South Delhi. Initially the abode of a Sufi saint, Kale Khan, it also served as a shelter space, a 'sarai', for travellers. In present-day New Delhi, Sarai Kale Khan is home to one of the city's largest bus terminuses, functioning as a transit point, or the permanent destination for poor rural migrants. According to Save The Children, an organisation that has been working with poor women and children in the area for almost two decades, Sarai Kale Khan has a population of approximately 280,000 people. Of this population, 70 percent are Muslim migrants, mostly from north India, and another ten percent are non-Muslim migrants. The non-migrant landowners form the remaining 20 percent of the population. This includes a few Muslims but most are from the Hindu Gujjar community.