A flirtatious wink made a young actress of Malayalam cinema a social media darling and a hate object of self-appointed guardians of Muslim culture within 24 hours. A few days earlier, the annual phenomenon of envious youth harassing and/or assaulting young couples played out on Valentine’s Day. These incidents have once again focused — or should have focused — the attention of right-thinking people on the issue of social restrictions being imposed on young citizens by a deeply entrenched patriarchal mindset which is alive, and indeed enjoying a new lease of life under the benign watch of BJP governments at the Centre and 19 states.
Continuous denial of the elementary freedoms of inter-gender socialisation has sprouted poisonous fruit.
Widespread ignorance of gender equality norms and exoticisation of women, has resulted in an explosion of sex crimes across the country. Molestation and harassment of women citizens and foreign visitors by socially illiterate and sexually repressed males has become a national embarrassment. According to records of the National Crimes Bureau, the incidence of kidnapping and trafficking of women has risen sharply and a rape outrage is committed every 20-30 minutes countrywide. Worse, the incidence of child abuse has shown a sharp rise in recent times.
The proximate cause of runaway sex and gender crimes in recent years is undoubtedly the dawn of the Internet age, which has made the most perverse pornography available at the click of a computer mouse. Shockingly, the US Supreme Court has held that the right to broadcast pornography is part and parcel of the fundamental right of freedom of speech and expression. This ruling has been seized by ugly American capitalism to flood the digital airwaves with perverse pornography which has unbalanced minds around the world, particularly in third world countries where illiteracy is widespread. For mysterious reasons the government of India refuses to block streaming of pornography into India despite this publication’s repeated demand.
Nevertheless, the root cause is the control-and-command mindset of the older generation which under the cover of religion and culture, economically blackmails and denies the country’s youth elementary freedoms of inter-gender socialisation. Regrettably the great majority of the country’s shallow teachers and educators share this regressive mindset, presumably because they were denied free socialisation in their youth.
Unfortunately as Dr. Shekhar Seshadri, professor in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at NIMHANS (National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences), Bangalore, has trenchantly observed, the downside of the much trumpeted glorious Indian culture is control-and-command households in which patriarchs and parents have little love and less respect for the personhood of children and youth. Changed attitudes conceding socialisation freedoms of children and youth is a necessary precondition for abating the rising wave of sex and gender crimes in contemporary India.