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This definition of Ram Rajya is not a police state enforcing a steel discipline upon the people it rules, but a web of naturally evolved checks and balances. That is why when in Mumbai a mob of 70 people molested ladies in the middle of the night it shocked the average Indian. A young girl in ornaments in the middle of the night all alone is no more provocative than a scantily dressed woman stepping out of a discotheque in the company of her boyfriend or husband.
Incidents like the one in Mumbai are not about police inaction per se, but the failure of the natural cultural checks that have held society civilized through millennia.
Consider the southernmost district of India, Kanyakumari district. The urban areas of this district have witnessed over the last decade an increased rate of incidents of violent "eve teasing," or sexual harassment; throwing acid on the faces of girls who declined overtures of love struck boys; girls making false allegations of harassment to settle scores, etc.
What is the reason for this? Should one blame it on provocative dresses or the male chauvinist nature of Indian culture? Urban conservatives would eagerly cling to the former while the leftist and missionary-backed human rightists and feminists would go with glee for the latter. But the truth does not seem to care for such superfluous considerations.
Every morning loads and loads of college students enter the urban area of the district where all the colleges are situated, crossing a bridge over a shallow channel. And every morning girls and ladies take baths in this channel, with nothing to protect them from possible ogling voyeurs. But in truth there is no need for such protection because there have never been such ogling voyeurs, despite the fact that inside the urban jungle incidents of gender-based violence have escalated.
Not a single educator or sociologist, it seems, has pondered over what it is in our educational system that, instead of increasing the inherent cultural checks that protect privacy, simply destroys that cultural beauty and creates an uncultured beast out of the student.
This is not an isolated incident that happens at one of the millions of urban-rural fault lines that crisscross India. It is a phenomenon that can be seen at any of India's rural bathing ghats where women bathe, enjoying the sunshine and the sparkling water of a running river or village pond. How does a culture that is at home with women taking baths in public produce mobs that molest a woman in the middle of the night?
Perhaps the real culprit is not the culture but that setting in the urban milieu that removed the inherent checks and controls that Indian culture has created. Indian culture is the only culture where the supreme personality of Godhead declares that He manifests in fulfillment of libido. But the Indic scripture adds that the fulfillment must be in harmony with Dharma , the inherent checks and balances that this culture has evolved through the ages.
When an urban culture and an education system come up that destroy in the individual his or her rootedness to culture and, as Tagore said, project the emancipation of a tree's roots from the soil as freedom for the tree, then Mumbai molestations will continue unabated. Perhaps it is high time that our sociologists and educators start pondering over how Indic culture can be more overtly fused with urban life, which is rootless and exists on the surface beneath which seethes the violence of the uncontrolled libido, just like lava waiting to erupt.
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(S. Aravindan Neelakandan is a social scientist working with an ecological NGO called Vivekananda Kendra -- Natural Resources Development Project in Nagercoil, India. He is also a freelance writer and author of the Tamil-language "God and 40 Hz." ©Copyright S. Aravindan Neelakandan) .
