The immoral police

Morality. Culture. Decency. All these, and there are more, are words that are thrown around increasingly frequently in our country to justify mindless violence and harassment. In Meerut, the police have started what they call “Operation Majnu”, which involves rounding up of couples in parks etc and beating them up. And to think they’re supposed to work under the Constitution. As the Booker prize winner Aravind Adiga would say, what a fucking joke. In this article, I plan to look at the phenomenon I like to call immoral policing.

In Mumbai, St. Valentine’s Day is a truly festive occasion. Love is in the air, shops start advertising huge hearts and cards, young boys stare expectantly at those shop windows while practising their mock proposals, Shiv Sainiks start sharpening their knives and sticks, and in general everyone is happy. The youngsters are happy for obvious reasons, and the Shiv Sena, too, for obvious, albeit different, reasons. A year before last, a group of Christians was holding a memorial service on Feb 14^th for a member of their community who had passed away. Sena activists ransacked the venue, beat up the men there and molested the women, tearing their clothes off. Apparently they mistook it for a Valentine’s day party. Yeah, right.

And it doesn’t stop with the hooligans. A college in Lucknow has now banned girls from wearing jeans, politicians maintain that the high number of rapes is due to the scanty dress sense of girls, someone issues a fatwa on Sania saying that she bares her midriff while playing and the sad part is we have many middle and old aged people who nod their heads in approval talking of “their days” when they had “decency” and they respected “culture” and obeyed their parents and never ran around with girls before marriage.

Let me tell you a thing or two about culture. Lord Krishna, a highly celebrated and popular Hindu God, is most famous for his amorous relationship with Radha. In fact, most temples that have statues of Krishna, also have a statue of Radha standing next to him, despite the fact that they never married. So, let me get this straight, you’ll pray at the temple, bowing your head before a couple of unmarried lovers and then step outside the temple and condemn them?

Across all cultures, we respect elders. Going by that principle, the people in the Stone Age must be most respected, even more so than the people who came afterwards who invented the sari, burqa etc, simply because they are older. They used to cover themselves with tree barks, often not covering large areas of their body. Did the people who came later do the same? No, they spoke of progress and evolution and new clothing styles emerged. Why should that stop now? If we are to blindly copy our forefathers and disregard evolution, we must accord the same respect to a scanty tree bark cloth that we do to a sari or burqa. The clothes that we force upon people to wear, calling it “culture” are simply the garments that were considered practical or fashionable a long time ago. Five hundred years from now, jeans might be part of “culture”. Am I saying that we must discard traditional clothes? No. But no one should be forced to wear them due to silly reasons like “culture”, when there may be far more practical alternatives. I’m inclined to ask, if someone wears a tree bark in public and calls it culture, as it is entitled to as much, will the moral police support them?

 And as far as safety is concerned, all an outsider can do is SUGGEST clothing guidelines so that people can help themselves and stay safe. Whether people choose follow them is ALWAYS their own decision and no can force them to do otherwise (e.g. Just as I can’t force you to wear a mini-skirt, you can’t force me to wear a sari). I personally find the sari, on certain occasions, to be far sexier than tshirts and jeans. Does that mean I get to beat up everyone who wears one? Or rape them and then say that they were baring their midriff, whereas they should’ve been wearing jeans and tshirts that don’t expose anything?

I have enormous respect for our hundreds of years of heritage and history. But as we have respect for where we come from, we need also to have respect for where we are, and know where we’re going. All three are different places. If we weren’t going anywhere, it wouldn’t be evolution. It is the twenty first century and you’d be hard pressed to find anything in common with your forefathers a thousand years ago.

Internet, malls, family, friends, sports, prayers, studies, festivals, FREEDOM. This is our culture now. There is no reason this isn’t just as good as what they had a thousand years ago, or even better. So don’t stop, buy that ridiculously red teddy bear for that girl you’ve been meaning to ask out, before you go to the temple to pray for marks. Wear a skirt one day and a sari the next and a tree bark after that. It’s our culture. Do make sure you have a couple of pink chaddis handy, though.

 

Notes:   the statement about the pink chaddis is made in reference to the “Pink Chaddi” campaign that was carried out after the attacks by the Sri Rama Sene.

~ by thebloggernextdoor on June 14, 2009.