Make love, not war

In Delhi’s beautiful Lodi Gardens, sitting behind bushes, leaning against trees, lovers hold hands — they kiss. The couples are delightfully indifferent to the prying eyes of scores of voyeurs hanging around them. Hiding behind the walls girding the expansive garden, groups of dawdling men snoop on these couples in love.They tarry on their cycles, occupy vantage points as if picking out the best seats in a cinema hall; waiting for the ‘best scenes’ to unveil before their eyes. At any time of the day or night, Lodi Gardens is a voyeur’s garden of earthly delights.

On the banks of Kolkata’s Dhakuria Lake, too, lovers sitting snug against each other, kiss, regardless of passers-by strolling around.
 
But contrast these romantic, peaceful images of couples in love with the masculine images of India’s custodians — the self-styled dictators and representatives of a modern India: its legislators, its policemen and women, its legal luminaries — all part of the growing troop of moralising, baton-wielding men from all religions and political faiths. Men who have chosen war instead of love as the marker of their loyalty to India.
 
This Sunday, Kerala (God’s own country) was to stage a unique ‘Kiss of love’ event. Couples were to kiss in public to protest moral policing in the state. But the police – both the moral brigade as well as the law enforcers – had other ideas. Chaos erupted at Kochi’s Marine Drive, the venue of the event, with sloganeering troops from Hindu and Muslim organisations and a students’ union gathering at the spot. Crowds swelled into the thousands.  Rather than ensure a smooth passage of the event, the police, not surprisingly, decided to bundle the organisers and protesters into the waiting police van. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad has already said it will “legally challenge” the attempt to kiss in public. Two petitions were also filed in the Kerala High Court, though the court refused to interfere with the event. But this was only after the state government assured the court that action would be taken in the event of any ‘illegal activities.’
 
Here is a shortened list of criminal and non-criminal activities that we are forced to contend with everyday: Loving each other in public is a crime. Hating each other is not. Kissing in public is a crime. Knifing each other is not. Expressions of loving intimacy in public are a crime. Expressions of violent male supremacy – molestations and rapes – are not.
 
India, increasingly, is becoming home to a culture that allows wars of all kinds to rage everywhere: gender violence on the streets, ethnic and communal strife across the country. And this oblique or direct endorsement of that culture of brittle attrition seems to have outlawed public expressions of love and peace. The police’s claims of moving swiftly into action against the protesters to preserve the peace surely cannot surprise anyone in this context.
 
Thoughts could stray to the recent incidents of violence at Trilokpuri in the Capital right under the nose of the inert police force. The very forces of morality and law enforcement which nipped Kiss of Love in the bud have time and again fomented violence; or passively watched violence unravel. Only a couple of days ago, the police had yet again stood by and allowed the leaders of a mahapanchayat at Bawana to make  inflammatory speeches against  Muslims. 

Had the Kiss of Love protesters chosen Delhi as the venue, the voyeurs of Lodi Gardens would  have fumed in indignation. In the blink of an eye, the voyeurs would have transformed themselves into self-righteous shouting and sloganeering vigilantes and marched to the spot. Like in Kochi, they would have similarly run this event to the ground.
 
Let’s try to imagine the same group of moral vigilantes protesting another kind of public activity (the truly vulgar kind): the harassment of women in public places, at parks, bus stops, on roads or in public transport, the lynching of people from the North East; caste atrocities and impending communal riots. Try as we may, our imagination fails to take wing in that direction. Moralistic men sensitive in ‘Indian culture’ are not outraged by these events. They only pay lip service to show their supposed rage.
 
Recall the horrifying incident of gang-rape on the night of December 6, 2012. The young woman and her friend were badly hurt and bleeding, as they lay naked on the road. Cars whizzed past, headlights shining on the wounded couple. The drivers ignored the friend even as he tried in vain to flag them down.
 
Later in an interview to India Today, the friend said, “Some cars stopped, saw us and left without helping.” Later at the hospital, lying in a pool of blood, he sought help from the people who stood by.  “One of them called my father and told him that there has been an accident. He did not tell them the name of the hospital where I was admitted. My relatives kept looking for me in every Delhi hospital.”
 
How many times have women harassed in public transport looked towards other passengers for support? How many times have we heard even one among them beat back the harasser, confront him as a transgressor of Indian culture? These are the very people who spend hours ruing the decline in Indian culture and values. But in that moment when they should defend those very values, they turn into mute spectators. They eventually turn out to be accomplices if not active agents of the culture of regressive impunity.
 
In this culture, any form of sexuality in public – in dress or behavior – is frowned upon if not outright attacked. But like the voyeurs of Lodi Garden, the peeping Toms, the flashers alongside the moral vigilantes thrive on esoteric sex. They pore over sexual images on the sly. But outside of their secretive world, they hound couples who dare kiss in public. They do that in the name of preserving the institutions of  family and the nation state.
 
Once the rhetoric and the mask are stripped off, all that remains is the plain and ugly truth of reality. Hope of sanity – of decency – recede more and more as the morality minders bask in the splendor of their immorality. Their rise has been phenomenal in the recent years. It is time to take note and get angry.

The author is National Editor, dna of thought