HINDU EXTREMISTS who recently dragged young women out of a fashionable bar in southern India and thrashed them as part of a morality campaign have vowed to assault couples who celebrate Valentine’s Day.
“Valentine’s Day is definitely not Indian culture. We will not allow celebration of that day in any form,” said Pramod Mutalik, founder of the Sri Ram Sena (Lord Rama’s army) which is leading the movement, earlier this week. “If people celebrate the day despite our warning, then we will definitely attack them,” Sena activist Gangadhar Kulkarni said.
Last month some 40 Sena members stormed the fashionable Amnesia bar in the liberal port city of Mangalore and assaulted female customers who they accused of behaving obscenely.
Claiming to be “the custodians of Indian culture”, they justified the assaults on the grounds that it would prevent local women from “going astray”.
The Mangalore attack and the warning about Valentine’s Day has triggered a nationwide debate on morality across a country that gave the world the Kama Sutra, the ancient treatise on human sexual behaviour. A video of the incident uploaded on YouTube has become one of the most watched clips on the internet.
Hundreds of young Indians expressed outrage at the incident.
“Ruining Indian culture?! So is this Indian culture – beating up women?” a 22-year old blogger wrote. “The Hindu religion professes respect to women. If one carefully reads the Vedas or ancient scriptures, then one can understand that women had much liberty in ancient India,” wrote another, in Bangalore.
The attack prompted Renuka Chowdhury, federal women and child development minister, to label the activists a “threat to national security”.
Sri Rama Sena is one of several radical Hindu groups that periodically target women’s conduct, inter-faith relationships, religious conversions and perceived western deviations from Indian culture. Many such groups surface around Valentine’s Day, which has over the years become popular in urban India as traditional social and sexual mores gradually become more relaxed.
Islamic groups in Muslim-dominated northern Jammu and Kashmir province have also warned courting couples not to be seen together in public. “It is like the Talibanisation of India, and such matters should be dealt with strictly,” Ms Chowdhury said, referring to the Islamic groups’ forcible imposition of harsh behavioural codes for women in the northwest frontier province.
Outrage over the Hindu groups’ attacks on women found resonance in the unlikeliest quarters.
Newly elected chief minister Ashok Gehlot of western Rajasthan state, the favoured destination of western tourists for decades, said he was opposed to Indian boys and girls walking hand-in-hand in pubs and malls.
He withdrew his remarks after widespread indignation, but Mr Gehlot said his move to end the “pub culture” was intended to preserve traditional values.
Such tacit official support for moralists, however, led New Delhi police commissioner YS Dadwal to issue a fiat to his force not to harass couples. “Law and order, not moral policing, is our job,” he said.