Moral Science for the modern Indian

Here are three pairs of new-age fables, with one common thread — our social conscience.  

I. A six-year-old girl is raped in a private school in Bangalore. Small groups of parents and neighbours go on protest marches. I search, but don’t see any reports of bus-burning or glass-breaking by any political party, youth wing or otherwise.

A TV channel claims that young people might be kissing and cuddling in a coffee shop in Kozhikode, Kerala. Within 24 hours, we are all reading about how the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha has attacked the cafeteria, smashed furniture, et al.

II. A man gets on a public bus, followed by a crying woman literally hanging on to his leg. It’s not quite clear what he has done, maybe he has taken all her earnings and is going to drink it away. She weeps, pleads with him. He hits her, pushes her, and finally throws her from the bus just as it drives off. Not one of us does anything — not the conductor, not me, not a passenger.

Many years later, and I am at a colony residents’ meeting. We are discussing neighbourhood issues and a middle-aged woman tells me how her husband saw a young couple kissing on the street outside their home. “My husband stepped out,” she tells me proudly, “and slapped the boy. Such anti-social elements must be checked.”

III. A family we know employs a young woman as housemaid. She comes to work at least twice a month with black eye and bruised arms, beaten by her drunken husband. Nobody reports the crime to the police, nor helps the girl escape the abusive husband.

We’re at a wedding lunch, and a cousin’s neighbour is telling us her housekeeping woes. The girl who worked for her was found romancing the young and rakish plumber down the street. “I had to throw her out,” she says. We all nod in complete understanding.

*****

Disabled people are thrown off airplanes, Dalit homes burnt down, and women paraded naked, but these barely ripple the family breakfast. However, let some young people get together to form an innocuous group called Kiss of Love to protest moral policing, and the indifferent Mr. Kumars and Mrs. Rajams instantly write impassioned letters to the editor in support of arresting the youngsters. ‘We need some degree of policing or there will be a failure of morality.’ ‘We can’t have disruptive permissiveness.’ ‘Kissing is against our sanskriti.’ ‘Holding hands is not part of our culture.’  

If a Martian were to visit India today, he would quickly learn exactly where our moral priorities lie. Child marriage, rape, dowry killings, marital violence, lynching by Khap Panchayats — these are all part of Indian culture. It’s nothing that political parties (or their youth wings thereof) need to worry about.

However, holding hands, dancing in a pub, wearing jeans or using mobile phones are grave offences that could instantly tear apart the country’s moral fabric. Ergo, we need mobs to attack these so that our high moral standards are maintained.

If I were that Martian, I would stay on Mars.