Two months ago the attack on young girls in a pub in
Mangalore, India came as a dent in the complacency of the government
so far as culture went. A self-styled moral force took the law into its own hands by barging into the pub, dragging the girls out and one of them was actually viewed being pushed on the floor. The alibi offered for the unpardonable assault was that they transgressed the limits of decency.
It was
Taliban of a different kind.
Mangalore, a rising hub of IT related activities, was a relatively peaceful urban town until this happened. Cosmopolitanism had penetrated Mangalore as much as any growing metropolis and with it all the modern paraphernalia like pubs had come about. Forget that. What matters is the sudden emergence of an unknown group priding itself as the custodian of Hindu culture.
In India polarisation on communal lines has become violence-prone in the recent years partly because of the religon-centred politics of the BJP and other groups. Besides all the talk about secularism has not held ground because of much-touited minority card held by the Congress and other centrist parties. Most of them do their political alignments with an eye on the vote bank. All this has let polarisation remain and become more acute.
A lot of fringe groups have emerged in the states too on one pretext or the other and the attack on women in Mangalore pub is a demonstration of this trend.
The outrage it provoked among the well-meaning intelligentsia and also the political elite was understandable It reminded one of the extreme privation women were put to in Afghanistan by Taliban. Many of the stories surfaced only when the Taliban government fell. Women were emboldened to speak about it and much of it was not pleasant to hear.
India's culture has been basically assimilatory and history is a pointer to that. Unfortunately these self-styled groups have no intellectual maturity to realise it or rise above sectarian considerations. Unless some legal steps are taken to ban them they will continue to fish in troubled waters. Nobody wants repetition of the kind that was done in Mangalore. Mahatma Gandhi said true freedom would be realised only if women felt free to walk alone in the streets at any time of the day. One only hopes that the day would some day dawn in India. That will be a demonstration of true democratic spirit.