New Delhi: Valentine’s Day in Madhya Pradesh proved to be somewhat bizarre. Bajrang Dal’s moral brigade found itself on the backfoot at Ujjain after mistaking a girl and her brother as a couple and beating them up.
In Karnataka’s Belgaum town Sri Rama Sene activists barged into a party hosted by employees of an IT company at Wadagaon Towers on the outskirts of Belgaum — an event they mistook for a Valentine’s Day party. They damaged furniture. A police case has been registered. In the morning SRS and Shiv Sena activists took out a bike rally and burnt greeting cards.
V-day celebrations in Karnataka were, however, trouble-free with the police arresting over 500 people, including Sri Rama Sene chief Pramod Muthalik, who had threatened to spoil the event. Thanks to the police the civil society which decided to push back hard against moral policing, V-Day came up smelling roses in Bangalore.
In Madhya Pradesh at least 46 selfstyled moral policemen were detained in Bhopal and Gwalior. In Indore, Askok Jain who runs a marriage bureau was roughed up by a mob of prospective grooms after he failed to bring the promised number of potential brides in a “parichay sammelan” (introduction convention for a mass wedding). That the event was scheduled on Saturday on Valentine’s day was coincidental.
At Ujjain, Bajrang Dal found itself in an embarrassing position when its activists attacked a brother-sister duo. The incident occurred on the campus of Vikram University. They spotted a girl student and a boy walking together holding hands. The moral brigade swung into action and went after the boy. They caught up with him near the main gate and slapped him twice. By this time, the girl appeared on the scene and shouted: “What are you doing? He is my little brother. He studies in class IX — he is 15 years old!” Embarrassed Bajrang Dal activists apologised to the girl, hugged the boy and disappeared from the spot.
In Haryana’s Jind district a sub-inspector Moola Ram pulled the hair of a college-going student when local people complained that she was “involved in immoral activities’ with a student. The SI and a constable have been suspended, the local SP said. Activists of Shiv Sena’s student front performed mock marriage of two couples and assaulted another in a park in Pune while a couple had their faces blackened in Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh.
