At last, we have a meeting of a minds, beyond religion, region, country and borders. The 'keepers of Hindu purity' has taken the path of their counterparts in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pray tell me, how is the 'Sri Ram Sene' different from the Talibani barbarians? I am talking about the
Mangalore pub atrocity.
First off, let me make it clear that this post is not about the rights and wrongs of pub culture. It is not about the morality of drinking and partying, whether by girls or by anyone else. My own views have always been conservative.
The issue here is the matter of choice of an individual in this democratic nation we call India.
Don't let us delude ourselves by saying that we can be insulated from the rest of the world in our social standards. If you do not want to party, or drink, so be it. If you want to 'control' your own daughters and sisters, so be it, if you can manage that! No one has the right to interfere or stop anyone else in doing what is essentially a legal act, once that person is old enough to decide for herself (or himself, actually).
Another issue is this concept of 'Hindu morality'. Who are
these people who would take into their own hands the responsibility of what is essentially the job of our gods? Hinduism has the concept of 'karma' nd 'phala'. If the 'karma' deserves a particular 'phala', it will be allotted by Fate. Do these keepers of morality assume that they are the keepers of Fate?
To carry these people's philosophy a little futher, they would probably hew to the concepts of Manu, contending that humans should be constricted to classes and castes as per their birth. (Here is a lead to
one version of the Manusmriti. Here's
another.) Little will it matter to these cultural terrorists that
The Bahagavad Gita has laid down a clear path for all sentient beings to find their own way to their individual deliverance, the immortal and beautiful concept of Moksha. Thus, these Hindu Taliban will, in the name of Sri Ram, take us back into the dark ages of casteism and oppression.
If the Afghan Taliban have their own tortured interpretation of the Holy Quran (which is grabbed upon by Hindu extremists too, to whip up hysteria), the Hindu Taliban have found a way to skew holy Hindu texts.
The ultimate aim of either the Taliban, or the so-called Hindu moralists, is the same, to build a culture of oppression where only the select few are allowed to decide on the society's future.