Moral Policing - written for The Hindu NXg

Homogenizing India’s composite culture into a rigid framework of black and white is a threat to its very existence. People, who support the fanatics in the Mangalore incident, are not stakeholders in Indian culture, but guardians of Victorian sensibilities and “moral propaganda”. So if our sensitive Vanar Sena of Muthalik does a bit of reading, they are to be shocked, and will certainly go back further in time, and they are to be even more so; or perhaps their motive was different. Guarding a woman’s honour has been used as a tool for far too long by the feudal rich in backward societies to exploit women – interestingly one does not notice such inequities in the poor- where women have equal stakes. Therefore, drinking, for long a male habit and instrument of torture, has become a symbol of liberation – though this development is unfortunate with respect to the health aspects. Culture is, so to say, a quantum vector field, a function of both space and time and certainly relativistic. The common thread in India’s dynamic culture has been tolerance and a demographical change cannot affect this – it is time we move out of our frozen mindsets and exchange ideas, for that is the only way to progress.