Decency, take a walk down the hall of shame

Here's a shout-out to almost every conservative in India who believes decency is the matter that needs their immediate attention, and it is his/her place to decide what should be done with people who do not comply with other people’s standards.

When a couple were thrashed onboard the Kolkata Metro by a group of middle-aged men for “standing too close in public”, police took their own sweet time to attend to the matter. I wonder, if the same group of people were having an orgy publicly, would there be a similar delay in police action.

The indecency in question here is the act of “standing too close”, which, by the way, is done mostly for protection. On board a train in India, women are groped, pushed and harassed on a regular basis. The fact that no official complaint has been lodged reflects on the most unfortunate fragment of reality. The victims “did not find enough reasons” to report their public humiliation.

This victim shaming has its own legacy. It is, in fact, such an intricately woven norm in society that it has governed the entire structural mechanism of justice. These civilities are exceptionally powerful in India. They exert force not only on matters of crime, but dressing, education, career choices, partners, behaviours, attitudes and so on. They are so deeply ingrained and encouraged that crimes such as honour killing exist.

When I was in 10th grade, my class teacher called me to speak in private. She told me that she had received a complaint that I was seeing a boy and we were seen kissing outside school premises. The words she used were enough to numb me. I didn’t speak a word. She asked my mother to meet her along with my elder sister, who was an alumnus of the same school. This was to make sure that my entire family got to know about this.

Before the meeting, my mother had told me to stand my ground and not get scared. When we arrived at the office, my teacher stated that I had accepted going out with a guy and kissing him. Then she started making up stories. At this point, I was not so scared. I told mom that I never confessed to anything, but she was too angry. I was accused, and not asked about what may have happened. The entire teaching staff came up to my mother and narrated a made up story about my “obscene acts”. They wondered aloud if my mother would be able to accept my shameful act. However, the boy I was accused of seeing was told that girls like me lay honey traps for them, and that he should watch out for us. His parents were never called.

For the rest of my days in school, I was shamed for my “lewd character”. My friends’ parents were advised to keep their prodigies away from me. The mother of a close friend of mine interrupted our phone conversation and asked to speak to my mom. She went on to blame my mom for her daughter’s poor score in tests and concluded that theirs is a “decent” family.

At the end of the year, my class teacher tried to remove me from the annual dance for which I had been working on for months. However, my dance instructor, who heard my side and believed in me, refused to to do so. She was, in fact, the only one to point out how I was being treated differently than the boy who had allegedly committed the same obscene act.

The first example of recognised power we come across in our lives is the school administration. The first seeds of decency are institutionalised in us by the standards of the school staff. In most local schools, students are chastened over occurrences where they are not really guilty of anything. It could range from little taunts in class or a major thrashing. The problem is that they condition us to become individuals who walk with our eyes down and are scared to look at any authority because it was our mistake.

Moral policing feeds off such conditioning. Barging into closed rooms, threatening people by calling their parents, abusing couples in public for being “characterless” is not just about having a conservative mind-set. It is about the power dynamics that gets established. Even harmless behaviour of the general public is subjected to scrutiny and regulation by vigilante groups and authorities, whichalign with the ruling ideology, by preying on what they perceive as indecent.

The government even uses the taxpayer’s money to fund and resource something such as moral policing (with an actual task force), thereby emboldening individuals who think it is up to them to act against “indecency”. When case like the Kolkata Metro incident is normalised, it will become more difficult to oppose this kind of imposition.

Indecency is not in love or friendship with the opposite gender. It is not in your haircut, uniform, nails or the length of one's skirt. A polite Q and A session or debate with your teacher does not qualify as one either. Maybe they can learn some lessons in decency on how not to physically thrash or emotionally scar students. Don’t let the vigilante groups school us the way our teachers did.