In land of the Kama Sutra, a
clampdown on romance?
By Somini Sengupta
The New York Times
THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 2006
MEERUT, India On a crisp winter's afternoon in this small, unremarkable
north Indian town, several couples - some married, some not - sat
together on the benches of a well-groomed little park named after the
country's most famous champion of nonviolence: Mohandas Gandhi.
Soon came a band of stick-wielding police officers with television news
cameras in tow. They yanked the couples by their necks, as though they
were so many pesky cats, and slapped them around with their bare hands.
The young women shielded their faces with their shawls. The men cowered
from the cameras.
Apparently intended to clamp down on what the police consider indecent
public displays of affection among unmarried couples, the nationally
televised tableau in Gandhi Park backfired terribly. It set off charges
of police brutality, prompted at least one young unmarried pair to run
away from home for a couple of days and revealed a yawning divide on
notions of social mores and individual rights in a tradition-bound
swath of India where the younger generation is nudging for change.
"This is a basic infringement of our right to freedom," cried Vikas
Garg, 21, a master's student in mass communications at the local
Chaudhry Charan Singh University, a couple of days after the raid.
"We are free to sit where we want."
Meerut police officials conceded that some officers overreacted.
But they also defended their actions. Couples sat in "objectionable
poses," said a defiant Mamta Gautam, a police officer accused in the
beatings, including some with people's heads in their partners' laps.
Yes, Gautam said, she had slapped those who tried to run away when the
police asked for names and addresses. "If they were not doing anything
illegal, why they wanted to run away?" she demanded. "I do not consider
that what we did was wrong."
By the end of the week, as public outrage piled on, Gautam and three
other police officers were suspended, including the city police
superintendent, pending an internal investigation.
In a society where dating is frowned upon, public parks remain among
the only places where couples can avail themselves of intimacy, from
talking to necking and petting with abandon under the arms of a shady
tree. Even if it is in broad daylight in a public park, romance before
marriage remains taboo in small-town India, which is why the spectacle
in Gandhi Park turned out to be such a big deal: to be outed in this
way, on national television, is to bring terrible shame and
recrimination on yourself and your family.
So alarming, in fact, was it for Amit Sharma and his girlfriend of two
years that the pair ran away from home hours after the incident. They
returned home more than a day later, only after their parents went to
fetch them from a nearby town where they were hiding and agreed, in
principle, to let them marry.
Days later, Sharma, 22 years old and unemployed, described the jarring
episode. The police swooped down on the couples in the park "as though
we were terrorists," grabbed them by their collars and separated the
men and women. He could hear his girlfriend, Anshu, crying and the
police yelling at her: "Your parents send you to college to study! What
are you doing here?"
"I pleaded with the police, 'Please let us go,"' he recalled.
Eventually, they were all released. No one was charged with a crime.
That afternoon in Gandhi Park, even a young woman sitting alone was not
spared. The woman, who gave her name only as Priyanka, said she was
waiting on a park bench when the shouting of the police interrupted her
thoughts. Getting up from her bench, Priyanka said she walked in the
direction of the commotion when a police officer - Gautam, as it turned
out - pounced on her and accused her of being a prostitute.
What is more, Priyanka said, the police officer slapped her and called
her a "chamari," a slur based on her caste. (Gautam denied making the
remark.)
Priyanka filed a complaint with police, calling it "a black spot" on
her reputation. "They did not ask any questions," she said. "They just
started beating. Now people in my village are reading that newspaper in
front of my father."
The episode sparked a national outcry. The National Human Rights
Commission ordered a police inquiry, and its chief, Justice A.S. Anand,
declared on television: "No civilized state can permit this type of
humiliation to be heaped on its young children."
From the political right and left came condemnation of the police
action. Brinda Karat, the most prominent woman representing a coalition
of leftist parties in government, denounced the police for pouncing on
courting couples while violent rapes go unsolved.
Sushma Swaraj, a legislator from the Hindu nationalist opposition
Bharatiya Janata Party, during a Parliamentary session called it a
product of "a sick mind."
Even so, the reprimands did not stop Hindu radical activists here from
storming Gandhi Park three days after the episode and, taking the law
into their own hands, beating up the small handful of couples who had
dared to return. The following day, Gandhi Park was empty, save for the
birds chattering in the trees.
Among young people in Meerut, the police raid prompted a seasoned
outrage. In interviews on the local college campus a few days after the
police raid, students said they frequently bore the brunt of police
harassment if they were seen with members of the opposite sex. They are
threatened with sticks, ordered to give their names and addresses and
released usually only after paying a bribe.
"Crime is increasing in Meerut day by day and the police are harassing
innocent girls and boys," said Sharma's father, Jagdish Kumar Sharma.
"How many Romeos they can catch? Romeos are on every lane and every
street."
Hari Kumar contributed reporting from Meerut for this article.