Lovers con moral cops

As the management cliché goes, every challenge is also an opportunity in disguise. Even as pink undergarments hijacked India’s courier services, and the nation’s pontificracy kept hyperventilating about the moral police, two star-crossed lovers in Hyderabad coolly got the moral police to play Cupid on Valentine’s Day.

Vijay Anand and Kriti had been deeply in love with each other for three years. But they could not marry because their parents were opposed to their ‘union’. Not an unfamiliar story in a country that invented arranged marriage. And if it weren’t for a stroke of pure amoral genius, their romance too, like that of so many other couples before them, might have got buried under the weight of parental opposition.

Earlier in the week, the couple had read in the newspapers that right-wing Hindu groups were planning to forcibly marry off couples found celebrating Valentine’s Day. Where most couples would have seen a nuisance, if not a threat, Anand and Kriti saw a future.
On Saturday, the two of them loafed about in the Koti area of Hyderabad “displaying their love” in public.

To their utter delight, they were promptly picked up by angry Bajrang Dal activists. The couple was marched off to the group’s office and ‘forcibly’ married off by a Hindu priest in the presence of Bajrang Dal leaders. If Anand and Kriti are man and wife today, it is thanks to the exertions of the accursed moral police.

Evidently, the cloud of moral policing does have a pink lining. Meanwhile, the Hyderabad police have said that they would play spoilsport only if the couple or their relatives lodged a complaint that they were forcibly married.