Love Commandos: A Story of Love, Marriage, and Exploitation in India

An interview with the co-hosts of "Love Commandos," a new podcast series from NPR's Rough Translation

Hi readers! I’m Tamar Eisen, and I provide research assistance for Jill for her newsletter. I was so excited to have the opportunity to speak with the co-hosts of “Love Commandos,” a special podcast from NPR’s Rough Translation.

In this short, gripping series, co-hosts Gregory Warner, Mansi Choksi, and Lauren Frayer take a deep dive into a group that protected Indian couples who faced harassment, violence, and even murder for the crime of being in a love marriage. This group — The Love Commandos — provided safe haven to scared lovers. But through the accounts of love marriage couples who went through the shelter, it emerges that the Commandos and its leader are not what they seem.

This podcast is a story of star-crossed lovers. It’s also the tale of con men, exploitation, and extortion. And at its heart, it’s a nuanced portrayal of marriage and love in a changing India.

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Tamar: Tell us a little about yourself and your work. How did you find yourself involved in this story? 

LAUREN: When I became NPR’s India correspondent, the Love Commandos was one of the first interview requests I made. The group had a catchy name, and an intriguing mission. So in the summer of 2018, I climbed up a dark stairway in a seedy part of New Delhi, to visit the group’s safehouse. Inside, I met four runaway couples in hiding. They struck me as reluctant rebels, trying to reconcile duty to family with a desire to follow their hearts. I reported a piece on them for NPR’s Morning Edition, and then we kept in touch over the next five years. Little did we know, we would all embark on a true-crime investigation together. As I spent time with them, and the Commandos who’d helped them, I found myself calling my editors with jaw-dropping updates. Nothing was as it first seemed. My editors on NPR’s International Desk realized this was more than a news story, and suggested I link up with Rough Translation’s podcast team – which I did in late 2018. The result is this true-crime series, nearly five years in the making. Reporting this has taught me so much about love and marriage in my adopted home – India – than any news story could.

MANSI: I’ve been following the rise and fall of the Love Commandos since the winter of 2016. It started as a magazine piece for Harper’s, grew into a book called the Newlyweds and finally, turned into a wide-lens view of India as a society in transition with the Rough Translation series. This series is the outcome of years worth of reporting, a lifetime of growing up in a rapidly changing society and a lot of thinking about the ideas of freedom and modernity. 

GREGORY: Thanks so much for asking these questions! I founded Rough Translation as a podcast that would follow familiar things into global contexts. For instance, how are Jane Austen novels being read as marriage manuals by upper-class Pakistani women? What does a wartime shortage of abortion pills in Ukraine reveal about the need for those pills beyond abortion?  Often the stories are about a shift in context that shifts our perspective, lessons that feel increasingly relevant to bridging divides in a polarized world. When Lauren started telling me the story of the Love Commandos, I was immediately curious how the group’s founder told a certain kind of story to Western donors that fit our narratives about romantic love. What I never expected was how the very couples he was sheltering might have become pawns in that story.

Tamar: This podcast focuses on the contentious nature of love marriages in India. Can you explain to our readers why there is such an emphasis on arranged marriage in India? And why are certain love marriages so controversial?