Don’t infantilise gender relations
Sakshi Maharaj should not engage in moral policing
Regulating people’s morals seems to have become an obsession with several politicians, not the least of whom is BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj. The MP is known to speak long and loud on how people should conduct themselves in keeping with Indian tradition and
ourtake culture of which he considers himself a custodian. The latest absurdity from him is a link between public shows of affection between men and women and rape. Couples behaving in what he considers a vulgar manner should be put behind bars before a rape happens and the police are blamed, he says. Now, much of this will not make sense to most people and should be ignored but the fact is that Mr Maharaj is a BJP MP and ought to be doubly careful when speaking on sexual violence against women.
The notion of consensual intimacy seems lost on people like Mr Maharaj who seem to favour some sort of Talibanesque code of moral conduct for young people. Under guise of enforcing Indian values, young people are increasingly under attack by louts posing as moral vigilantes. The choice of a partner from another community is being termed love jihad with no proof that this is a deliberate trend. Nobody, and certainly not an elected representative has any business to try and police the private lives of people, their choice of partners or their conduct in public unless this happens to violate some law.
This regressive mindset is indicative of a warped view of relations between men and women. Mr Maharaj, it would appear, is spending an inordinate amount of time checking on people’s behaviour in cars and on motorbikes. The worst is that he has said that this behaviour leads to rape, a serious crime against women for which the causes are very different. This suggests that he is either ignorant or deliberately provocative. Either way, he should be taken to task by his party’s leadership. Anyone attempting to infantilise rape and tie up normal interaction with morality does not deserve to be a representative of the people. The party ought to do an audit of what real work Mr Maharaj and his ilk have done for the people who have elected them.