India’s moral police getting out of hand

By M H Ahssan

It says something for Indian society that the colour which was all pervasive on Valentine’s Day was not pink, associated with love and softness, but khaki, which stands for the police whose attitude to citizens is generally marked by force, callousness, and not unusually brutality. On February 14, the day when the idea of love is exalted, the police in all states were ordered to be out in strength to stop vigilante groups from harassing young men and women who desire to make their mutual affection public. Several such groups had given advance notice of their intention. Thankfully the day passed without incident by and large. But in states where it did not — notably Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Haryana — the police did little to redeem themselves. In Karnataka, they looked the other way when a young Mangalore girl committed suicide after being harassed by a fanatic Hindu group for being seen in the company of a Muslim boy.

In a flagrant instance of dereliction of duty, the local superintendent of police later told a television channel that apprehending the culprits could have brought on a communal situation. The state home minister also turned his face away. In Pune in Maharashtra, hoodlums associated with the Shiv Sena forced a girl to “marry” a donkey — a perverse thought clearly meant to detract from the dignity of the victim. In Rajasthan, the police took their cue from the chief minister and used force to scatter youngsters doing nothing more objectionable than offering each other flowers as a token of affection. In Haryana, a police official beat up a young woman and her friend inside her home after making an unauthorised and wholly illegal entry. Later the police took the plea that he had entered a private home in order to protect its owner!

All of these are disturbing signs, and show how far we are yet from the idea of respecting individualism and democratic norms in the social sphere even as we profess to be a political democracy. Vigilante groups were tolerated by the authorities in Karnataka and Maharashtra, which are thought to be progressive states, and in towns such as Bengaluru, Mangalore and Pune which are commonly used to advertise India’s modernity in the age of ether. It took spunky action by a hastily formed civil society outfit to stop the Hindutva-oriented Sri Ram Sene in its tracks. Their ingenious plan was simplicity itself — the dispatch of piles of pink-coloured female underwear to shame the leader of the SRS.

In Rajasthan and Haryana, it was the police that became the vigilantes. Seen in conjunction with the recent pub incident in Mangalore — where young women were physically assaulted by SRS goons — it becomes clear that the parading of so-called cultural norms was essentially a means to keep women from asserting their autonomy as individuals — in effect, keeping them in burqa, not unlike a repetition of what the Taliban are doing in Swat in Pakistan. Because Hindutva forces were in the forefront in the ugly pub episode and the Valentine’s Day disturbances, a communal tint is also lent to the actions of the culture-warriors.