Meerut: The father of the 22-year-old Meerut girl in ‘love jihad’ case said on Wednesday that he has no problem about his daughter marrying Kaleem, said a report. He said that that his daughter is an adult and she is free to marry him.

The statement of the girl’s father came a day after city police booked her parents under charges of assault and murder threat.

The girl on October 12 had retracted her earlier allegations of gang-rape and forcible conversion by a Muslim man Kaleem.

The father of the girl said that he never tried to politicize the matter.  “Political parties started approaching us since the issue was first raised on August 3,” the father added.

He also said that he had no intention to gain publicity to his daughter’s affairs.

In a new twist in the case on Tuesday, the girl in question had alleged that a BJP leader Vineet Agarwal gave Rs 25,000 to her parents days after she filed an initial complaint in the case on August 7.

However, the girl’s father accepted that some Hindu outfits offered him Rs 25,000 as they were financially weak.

On October 12, the had made a U-turn in the case saying eloped with a Muslim man willingly and there was no case of love jihad.

The girl in a statement to police said that she was staying with her parents, but ran away from home as she was feeling threatened from her parents and relatives. “I went with the boy belonging to a different community out of my own will,” she had said.

The issue had forced the BJP on the back foot after a severe drubbing in the UP Assembly bypolls. If the political observers are to be believed BJP has paid for its communal politics and the recent example of it was the ‘love jihad’ propaganda.

The defeat was seen as a big loss of face for Amit Shah as the newly appointed BJP national president focused on the state in an attempt to wrestle it back from the SP ahead of the assembly polls in 2017.