Friday, July 31, 2009

Do we need Moral Policing?

Indians by nature have a tendency to mix up religion, traditions, myths, superstitions and caste system under the common umbrella of country's rich culture. Its all right if you do it at your home but once it goes out becomes the root cause of many complex and apparently insolvable problems. One such problem is the issue of moral policing. "Moral Policing" means the voluntarily harassment done upon people by some individuals,social groups or organizations in the name of guarding their societies when anything like that even doesn't have existence. Each day we see the newspapers piled up with news of some xyz group committing atrocities on people in the name of God, religion etc. Latest being a women stripped on Patna road because she was caught with his boy friend and its against the wish of descent society. What happened in Mangalore pub last year is not hidden from anyone but no strong action was taken against these self defined social policemen by the govt., may be they are more busy in discussing "Sach ka Samna" in parliament when they actually are running away from the truth. Women and minorities offer the soft targets to these social contractors and are often at the receiving end of their misdeeds.In the times when we are talking about India developing into a super power and are getting bold enough to discuss gay rights this is extremely annoying that constitutionally adult unmarried couples still fear in going out in public only due to the social policemen like shiv sena, ram sena etc. but do they really want a prosperous India, do they really worry about Indian women, have they done anything for millions of under nourished people? I seriously doubt their intentions. Where were these fundamentalists who claim to believe in the fundamentals of religion when a women was raped by a mob on a new year night at a place like Gateway of India? Nobody dares to ask them because of the tremendous power and influence they bear on our innocent public. In Manglore case even after rigorous lobbing done by National Women Commission the main accused Pramod Muthalik head of Sri Ram Sena was granted bail within a week of the incident. Whatz our judiciary doing, where the hell are the constitution provisions? This whole incident revamped the arguments to at least re-energize the system if not re-invent it but to do anything like that legislature comes in between and in post independence era one thing India have witnessed is a Jai-Veeru chemistry between politics and crime, so finally we ended up exactly from where we started. Everything is still not over but the need of the hour is to take right steps quickly and efficiently. A new piece of govt. act won't do the trick, there is an extreme need to reorganize the police force, create rapid action forces especially in metros and big cities, strengthen the independent bodies like NCW, NHRC, decriminalize politics and most importantly arouse social consciousness. There is an extreme need to bring the perpetrators to justice. So, what India needs is Moral Police, police which offers quick justice to sufferers but certainly not the Moral Policing. Do we?

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