LOVE AND LIFE IN THE TIME OF PARANOIA - Nandini Thilak

A man and a woman, approaching middle age are traveling together in a car. They stop at an empty house and go in together, closing the door behind them. I’m sure you’re getting suspicious already but let’s go on. Say it’s nearing midnight, a residential area, and the two individuals are not joined together in ‘holy matrimony’. They spent a fair amount of time inside in this house. Does that make you uncomfortable? Not something you care for particularly?

Chances are your liberal mind is wriggling a bit. Chances are that you think you have a right to be uncomfortable with the above described rendezvous. Because that seems to the immediate reaction of large sections of society, self described young ‘liberals’ included. Most of us rejoiced when the notorious section 377 of the Indian penal code was repealed. But as always realities have changed very little; social attitudes remain, punishing those let off by law and the state. Last week an AMU professor was suspended for having consensual sexual relations with another man; rewarding those sick minds who took pleasure in filming this individual’s private acts secretly to present as evidence of his ‘crime’. The same people who frown at girls and boys chatting in cafes or walking down the street together, nodded in approval. “Sure, he’s done nothing illegal but he’s supposed to be a respectable man, it’s not right…” is the cowardly argument.

What constitutes respectability? Doesn’t excelling in one profession or being a law abiding citizen make one respectable? Aren’t romantic involvements and sexuality in private domain; part of an individual’s personal freedom? What authority does the society have over the private lives of its members? Who constitutes ‘society’?

Lets go back now to where we began. The man and the woman are alone in the house. A crowd of ‘citizens’, concerned over the immorality of it all, surround the house, holding the two individuals hostage. The police are summoned, the media rush to the spot to revel in the ‘sex scandal’. The man and the woman are led out into
jeeps handcuffed as champions cheer and jeer. Two unsuspecting individuals, respectable citizens until that night, are ordered to take a medical test to prove that they did not have sex and hence are innocent of a non-crime. No one asks “so what if they did do it? Is that a crime?”

Writers and intellectuals cower in front of hooligans who criminally invaded the privacy of two people, the ‘educated’ youth jeer at how low and vulgar the older generation has stooped. Lone voices which hinted at
the ridiculousness and gross evil of the situation are beaten down; gheraoed and man handled. Two lives destroyed in the name of social facades of morality.
 

And this happened in ‘modern’ India, not in some remote pocket of Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, but in one of the most advanced states in terms of education, political awareness and standard of living. Situation is no different else where. Personal freedom of all kind is trampled upon in the name of social norms. A couple can be forcible married off by saffron painted goons if found talking by themselves at a public place. And they will do it with the support of many who pretend modesty has been out raged by free expression. The same men who go home and rape their wives and maids are given the authority to abuse and beat up women who dress against ‘Indian culture’ and go out at night, all in the name of enforcing social rules and protecting the fast degrading moral fabric of oursociety.
 

The violation of personal freedom goes beyond issues of sexuality or women’s rights. The attitude that representatives of ‘society’ have the right to censor personal acts of individuals who are part of it, the right to
take offense and punish those who go against pretenses of morality, decency and respectability pervades across all sections of the population.
 

It’s always the crowd against one or two, moral wrongs against rights and freedom, what’s decent and the done thing against what’s not. Sure, being a part of society means following some rules, but at some point the
social being ends and the private individual begins and he/she’s got a right to private life; to free expression and love and vices and ‘immorality’, as long as he/she doesn’t intentionally or other wise harm another being.
Is individual freedom to live life as one chooses in relative peace to be considered secondary to the hypocritical whims of society? Let’s hope not.