Column

The assault and abuse of young women in a Mangalore pub on the eve of India’s 60th Republic Day by members of a hitherto-unheard-of organisation called the Sri Ram Sene, evidently working to establish a perverse understanding of Ram Rajya, marks a new low in the record of crimes against women in a country where the bar was already way too low.

It also marks the disturbing opening up of a new front in the culture wars unleashed from time to time by the pan-Hindutva pantheon of political parties and their social affiliates.

As has happened too often in the past, Mangalore’s self-anointed cultural warriors, claiming to be defenders and upholders of ‘Hindu culture’ and public morality, subjected several young women who were having a drink at a pub to ritual abuse and outright assault. The fact that the Sri Ram Sene’s foot soldiers were uninhibited by the presence of media cameras points to a naked brazenness that mocks the rule of law and gives rise to a deep sense of disquiet. The Sene’s ‘general’, savouring his Fifteen Minutes of Fame, has promised more such lawless moral policing action in defence of ‘Hindu culture’ — whatever that means.

Early responses to the Mangalore attack have been characterised by an erroneous framing of the cultural context in which they occurred, which plays into the hands of the perpetrators of what is, first and foremost, a crime against women. The fact that the women were having a drink — or even otherwise stretching the behavioural norms traditionally associated with women in India — cannot be invoked to suggest that they were somehow ‘asking for it’ or were not entitled to protection for lawless hooliganism.

To argue thus, in effect, debases the rule of law and provides the intellectual space for self-appointed moral policemen to impose their blinkered, repressed and perverse worldview on civil society.

This isn’t, of course, the first time that ‘cultural warriors’ in India have resorted to aggressive moral policing to set an imagined benchmark for public morality. The Sri Ram Sene’scomrades-in-saffron have launched similar campaigns against, for instance, young couples celebrating Valentine’s Day or even just engaging in public display of affection. In those instances too, the debate was clouded over by an erroneous framing of the intellectual argument. Those who criticised the hooligans’ action then were not defending the inalienable rights of hormonally driven couples to pet each other in public or exchange roses to celebrate a syrupy festival thought up by merchandising wizards to sell love-themed baubles. The defence, if anything, was of the rights of even impressionable, love-lorn youngsters who don’t know better, to protection from rowdyism in the name of God and culture. No ‘cultural education’ campaign has the right to be downright unlawful or even marginally coercive.

The responses to the Mangalore attack reflect the dilemmas in positing the event in a cultural context. An improper nuance could, for instance, position you as the defender of “immoral” social practices, which works to the advantage of these custodians of culture. But, as is abundantly clear, these are false choices thrust upon us; they deserve nothing less than an outright rejection.

What, then, should the appropriate administrative and political response to this attack be? The political calculus appears to be that a response that looks at it purely from the prism of the establishment of the rule of law might in the short term actually reward its perpetrators. Who, after, had heard of the Sri Ram Sene earlier? Cracking down on it now would only invest its leaders with the halo of martyrdom and a badge of honour as defenders of an ill-defined (and undefinable) Hindu culture.

But political pussyfooting of this sort is dangerous in the long term. The only appropriate response to such crimes against women is one that communicates a zero-tolerance approach and the supremacy of the rule of law.

The political history of all of ‘god’s armies’ — be it the Shiv Sena, the Bajrang Dal, or the new goons on the block, the Sri Ram Sene — shows that only in the absence of a powerful political response do they gather strength and momentum. And, what’s rather more dangerous, at that point, their perverse, marginal worldview becomes ‘mainstreamed’.

The BJP leadership at the national level appears to be distancing itself from the Ram Sene, projecting it as a fringe element with which it has little in common. Perhaps its leaders have forgotten their own humble roots. For all their protestations, however, what cannot be denied is that the Mangalore pub attack draws its intellectual inspiration from the divisive and socially regressive philosophy that underlies the Hindutva mindset.