Bangalore: Hadiya, on her first visit to Kerala after the Supreme Court restored her marriage with Shafin Jahan, said on Saturday that the Popular Front of India had been the only organisation that agreed to help her when she sought to embrace Islam.
The BJP has been stoking controversy over Hadiya's links with the PFI, an apolitical organisation that Jharkand recently banned after some of its members allegedly joined the Islamic State.
Hadiya, 25, and Shafin, who arrived in Kerala on Friday night on a three-day trip, met PFI head P. Aboobacker at the outfit's Kozhikode office and made a brief appearance before the media.
"I had approached many Muslim organisations when I decided to convert but none except the PFI came to my aid," Hadiya, who was earlier Akhila Asokan, said.
Shafin echoed her: "When we faced all these issues, it was the PFI that gave us legal support. So we came here to them."
Kerala High Court had last May annulled Hadiya's marriage on a petition from her father Asokan, who claimed she had been radicalised and brainwashed into conversion and marriage so that she could be sent abroad to join a terrorist outfit.
But the apex court on Thursday restored the marriage, upholding adults' right to choose their spouses.
"Why should anyone be made to go through such trouble?" Hadiya, who had arrived from Tamil Nadu where she is studying homoeopathy, asked reporters.
"The Constitution gives us the freedom to choose any religion. All this happened just because I had converted to Islam."
Asked how she felt after the apex court verdict, Hadiya said: "We feel we got back our freedom."
The couple left after about 10 minutes, saying they needed rest, but promised to address a news conference in Kozhikode on Monday. Local journalists later said the couple had visited Shafin's relatives in Malappuram but there were no indications they would visit Asokan, who lives in Kottayam.
Kerala BJP politician V. Muralidharan said: "The Left and the Congress have all along claimed it was a pure love marriage. But the couple's admission that it was the PFI that helped them is enough to establish an extremist link to the whole episode."
The PFI, associated with a puritanical form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, has been linked to "love jihad" --- an alleged conspiracy to lure Hindu girls into conversion and marriage to recruit them as terrorists. Several states are said to be considering banning it, while Kerala and Karnataka have denied any such plans.
It was PFI women's wing president Sainaba who facilitated Hadiya's conversion and found her a groom.
Muralidharan highlighted that the apex court had not quashed the "love jihad" investigation in Hadiya's case, and demanded a thorough probe.