All this is being done in the name of a notion of Hindu culture whose assertion is based on a denial of India’s real past.
About 21,37,520 young men and women were questioned for being out with each other in public by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s anti-Romeo squads between 22 March and 15 December last year.
This offers a sobering reminder of how far moral policing has gone in today’s India. Worse, it turns out that of those questioned, 9,33,099 have been officially “warned” and 1,706 FIRs issued against 3,003 persons. All this happened in less than nine months.
So, this is what a once-free society has been reduced to: multiple police squads, each consisting of a sub-inspector and two constables, patrolling UP’s university campuses, college yards, cinema theatres, parks and other public places, looking for “Romeos”. The term seems to be loosely defined, entitling the cops to stop and question any young couple. While it may have once been intended to curb harassment by louts loafing in public places to “eve-tease” unwary women, the sheer numbers reported confirm that the harassment is now coming mainly from the authorities and not from their targets.
The term “anti-Romeo squad” is itself telling. It traces its origins to the “Roadside Romeos” of my own youth – raffish fellows in drainpipe pants, wavy locks and rakish moustaches, usually unemployed, who lounged about whistling at, or singing snatches of Bollywood film songs to, passing women. They were usually ignored, and mostly harmless.
Today’s UP police have a far broader target: a Romeo is any young man aspiring to woo his own Juliet. Shakespeare’s Romeo, after all, defied convention and evaded his disapproving parents to pursue his love for a woman from the wrong family. That is precisely what Yogi Adityanath does not want Romeo’s 21st century imitators to do.
The anti-Romeo squads are merely the latest sign of the continuing assault on any cultural practice deemed to be insufficiently Hindu by the self-appointed guardians of Indian culture.
A new spurt of arrests is likely as the anti-Romeo squads double their vigilance for Valentine’s Day. Till Yogi’s victory, policing Valentine’s Day lovers was a task undertaken by lumpen activists of assorted senas and dals; now, in a sort of reverse privatisation, it is a task that has been taken up by the BJP-run state.
And what of the freelance anti-romance troublemakers? After years of attacking couples holding hands on 14 February, trashing stores selling Valentine’s Day greeting cards, and shouting slogans outside cafes with canoodling couples, Hindutva activists changed tactics last year. The Hindu Mahasabha announced that it would send squads out to catch any unmarried couples out for a tryst on Valentine’s Day and promptly cart them off to a temple to be married. (And, if the Hindutvavadi MP and Godse-admirer Sakshi Maharaj has his way, they will be lectured on the virtues of producing between four and ten children forthwith, in order to give his fantasies a voting majority.)
The police uniform-clad face of intolerance might be amusing if it weren’t for the fact that it is deadly serious. The nativists argue that Valentine’s Day is an imported celebration, which it is (but so is Christmas, or Milad-un-Nabi, or International Women’s Day, for that matter, and they don’t have the nerve to attack those). They also argue that it is un-Indian because it celebrates romantic love, and there they’re completely wrong.
Historians tell us that there was a well-established Hindu tradition of adoration for Kamadeva, the lord of love, which was only abandoned after the Muslim invasions in medieval times. But then no one in the Hindu Mahasabha has any real idea of Hindu tradition—their idea of Indian values is not just primitive and narrow-minded, it is also profoundly anti-historical.
In fact, what young people today call ‘PDA’ or ‘public display of affection’ was widely prevalent in ancient India. As late as the eleventh century, Hindu sexual freedoms were commented upon by shocked travellers from the Muslim world.
Today’s young celebrants of Valentine’s Day are actually upholding India’s ancient pre-Muslim culture, albeit in a much milder form than is on display, for instance, in Khajuraho. In a sense, 14 February is their attempt at observing Kamadeva Divas. How ironic that they should incur the disapproval of the self-appointed custodians of Hindu culture!
But let’s face it: this is less about teenagers dating than about the ruling dispensation’s political project of transforming secular India into their idea of a Hindu state. Tradition is sought to be upheld in the name of culture: Traditionalism benefits those who want to uphold the social order, ensure discipline and conformity, and prevent radical change. Love affairs, which may cross caste or religious lines, are to be disapproved of for threatening this social order. Worse still, they reflect the autonomy of the individual and her right to choose, which is anathema to those who would prefer to make faceless cow-worshippers of us all.
All this is being done in the name of a notion of Indian culture whose assertion is based on a denial of India’s real past, and invoking an imagined past. India’s culture has always been a capacious one, expanding to include new and varied influences, from the Greek invasions (which taught Hindus to make temples to worship their gods) to the British (who created our censorious Penal Code). The central battle in contemporary Indian civilisation is between those who, to borrow from Walt Whitman, acknowledge that as a result of our own historical experience, we are vast, we contain multitudes, and those who have presumptuously taken it upon themselves to define—in increasingly narrower terms—what is ‘truly’ Indian.
The Constitution is the only bedrock of true Indianness. All who cherish the freedoms engraved in our Constitution must resist the pernicious menace of the anti-Romeo squads.
“Wherefore art thou?” Shakespeare’s heroine asked. Wherefore are we? We must stand up for Juliet.
Dr Shashi Tharoor is a Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram and former MoS for External Affairs and HRD. He served the UN as an administrator and peacekeeper for three decades. He studied history at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, and International Relations at Tufts University. Tharoor has authored 17 books, both fiction and non-fiction; his most recent book is ‘Why I am a Hindu’. Follow him on Twitter @ShashiTharoor
Only If your party and communist parasite backed by your party let Indian learn about pre-Islamic India in School.
Didn’t read the article as don’t belong to Mr Shashi Tharoor’s niche club of admirers who love his twisted arguments and over-the-top intellectualism.
In that capacious culture which the writer alludes to, the temples of Khajuraho and the underlying esoteric traditions were but a drop in that kaleidoscopic and vast civilization called Aryavarta. Important as they were, in no way could it be argued historically that what these monuments stood for is what animated society at large and informed social mores. To use it as a basis for argument does not advance truth.
What if our forebears were Victorian prudes, not the uninhibited sort we see in Konarak and the Kama Sutra … There is no need to seek validation for the present by turning to the glories of our mythical past. Our children are going up in a globalised world, even Haryana’s chhoris have little use for the diktats of the khaps.
The ugly and the unwanted to whom no body cares and love are the real disrupter of Valentine day.