The third Monday of January, which falls this year on the 20th, is a federal holiday in the U.S., in honour of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 's birthday. Born on 15 January 1929, Dr King was assassinated on 4 April 1968. A bill passed by Congress led to his birthday being commemorated as a federal holiday on the third Monday in January since 1986.

The U.S. Presidential Inauguration also takes place on 20 January. This will mark the third time ever for a president to take the oath of office on the holiday designated for Dr Martin Luther King – the earlier two were President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama.

Dr King’s children have urged supporters to hear what President Trump has to say, even if they do so later. The ideals of equality, justice, human dignity, and peace that Dr King stood for remain relevant, opposed by those threatened by these concepts.

Racial discrimination is still very much alive in America and elsewhere although its forms may have evolved. What was once overt, physical, and labour-based is now evident in other forms, including employment.

In India and other countries of South Asia, discrimination is predominantly caste-based -- a form of discrimination that migrants have brought with them to the U.S.

Purity

In South Asia and much of the world, families and communities largely determine the life choices of their members, to retain land and inheritance, preserve lineage and culture, and preserve ‘racial purity'. Families prioritise the marriage of their children within the same community or clan, even if the relationship is incompatible.

The technical term for this practice is endogamy -- marrying within a particular social or cultural group in accordance with custom or law. In such situations, miscegenation -- marriage or interbreeding among different races -- or exogamy, marrying outside of a social group, not necessarily limited to race -- are taboo.

This leads to 'self-pollination' or inbreeding. The effects of this are all too obvious in Pakistan, where there is a high rate of genetic disorders, particularly Thalassemia, due to inbreeding.

There are horrendous stories in South Asia of inter-caste or inter-religious couples being hunted down, tortured, and killed, often at the hands of their own family members – so-called ‘honour killings’. The couple may be completely disowned. Gay couples have it even worse.

But there is hope. It was not until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down America's so-called “anti-miscegenation” statutes as unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment.

“Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the state,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote.

The writer Isabel Wilkerson in her award-winning book Caste, links race and caste oppression, an issue captured by filmmaker Ava Duverney in her gripping feature documentary Origin (2023).

The concept that all human beings have the right to live in dignity and the right to agency has gained ground with human evolution. It is something to aspire towards.

“Love is about the freedom to choose who you want to be with. And this freedom to choose and to think for yourself often scares people from acknowledging love. But once love gets normalised, equality gets normalised,” as lawyer and interfaith activist Rubab Mehdi puts it.

No one has the right to interfere with consensual relationships between adults – not the state, or society. Historically and traditionally, this has not been the case.

And yet, lovers who die or are killed for their love are the heroes and heroines of folklore – from Romeo and Juliet to Sassi Pannu, and Heer Ranjha. The villains are those who try to stop them, the forces of status quo.

But changes are taking place quietly on the ground. Violence makes headlines, while the hundreds of thousands who connect quietly across divides don’t make the news.

Not so long ago the Ku Klux Klan similarly hunted down inter-racial couples in the USA.

In The Heart Divided (1957) a posthumously published novel by political activist Mumtaz Shah Jahan, set in the time leading up to India’s independence from British colonists in 1947 and its simultaneous Partition, the story revolves around two families that have been close for generations. One family is Hindu, the other Muslim. They even go on holidays together. But when two young people from either family fall in love, they cross an invisible line.

Many South Asian folk tales far older than Shakespeare tell similar stories. Even today, our culture remains much like the old European times where marriage was a partnership between families not individuals.

Education and greater world exposure has led to evolving aspirations of human equality.

The young people in The Heart Divided hope that their families’ relationship will prevail over traditional barriers. Instead, decades of love and friendship are swept away as family elders unite to prevent the union.

You can be best friends, but inter-marriage is where we draw the line - endogamy.

Fear

Behind this worldview lies fear and a desire to retain the status quo. Fear that a culture and a way of life is being endangered. Letting go means entering uncharted territory. What will happen to the children, what religion will they follow? Such unions entail moving away from the old set path, to new, unknown ones.

A Hindu-Muslim couple from South Asia I met in England years ago decided to not have children for this very reason.

The backlash to the acceptance of consensual relationships between adults is visible in America. Those who showed their adherence to liberal values by voting for a Black president were not prepared for a law that legalised gay marriage.

It’s fine to be liberal and progressive until it hits home. You may know that your child is gay, but you don’t want them openly dating or marrying their gay partner.

Small, persecuted communities tend to be more conservative, due to an existential fear of being wiped out, losing language, religion, culture, traditions.

The greater danger, however, lies not in these smaller communities trying to preserve their culture and heritage, but from the majoritarian, hyper-nationalist, hyper-religious forces in countries like India and Pakistan, or white supremacists in the USA, using moral policing and violence to enforce their ideas.

People will always cross all kinds of barriers for love. A 19-year old Pakistani woman and a 26-year old Indian man who fell in love after interacting online couldn’t get visas to each other’s countries. So, they met and married in Nepal, then went to live in India where the man worked as a security guard.

These are young people from ordinary backgrounds. They’re not trying to make a political statement. They ended up in jail. The woman was deported to Pakistan. The man was imprisoned for bringing a Pakistani into the country illegally.

Why was this couple so threatening? Why not allow them to be together? Why not give the Pakistani woman a visa on the basis of her marriage to the Indian man?

Holding on to harmful practices because of fear of the unknown is the opposite of letting go, which entails courage and curiosity. It entails trust that we are becoming better human beings in the process, making the world a better place.

Evolution is part of life. We can’t see where it will lead to, but we know it will be different, and hopefully better, than the past.

The world is endangered not by lovers who follow their hearts but issues like climate change and corporate greed. Those who open their hearts see beyond the limitations of caste, class, religion and race. Isobel Wilkerson herself was married to a white man.

That is why we need to keep building solidarities across caste, race, class, sexual orientations, ethnicities, religions, nationalities.

"I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems" as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said in his ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’ address, 1967.

(The writer is a journalist and peace activist, founder editor of Sapan News. Views expressed are personal. By special arrangement with Sapan)