Vexation, Violence and Valentine’s Day

No doubt, Valentine’s Day has become a vexed issue, but one was pleasantly surprised to receive quite a few phone calls that commenced with ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’. For someone who’s Facebook status is permanently ‘single’, such greetings are usually taken with a generous pinch of salt, but the very mention of the V-word can set off seriously vitriolic verbiage in certain circles.
“Let’s face it. The Anglicized-Americanized urban elite have been celebrating V-Day since the ’70s, when there were no specialized greeting cards, and we made do with all-occasion cards to wish our significant others. This Rose Day-Propose Day stuff wasn’t around then. Then came the day when India opened up to a market economy. And within a decade, this pseudo-Valentine’s Day, with all its ‘buy this, buy that’ merchandizing, came along. I remember attending a Valentine’s Day party in Patna in 1994 or 1995, in a small joint called Jughead’s. About a dozen couples, some married, of course. Valentine’s Day is really a special day to celebrate committed love. I don’t like the way this day is being trivialized into some ‘chhokri patao’ day,” says Floyd D’Costa, who has since moved to Mumbai from Patna. Mrs D’Costa too recalls the fun they had that day in Patna. “I have a teenaged son and he’s been taught to understand the true significance of the day.”
“You don’t want your teenagers to be led astray by Valentine’s Day hype? Try sex education and proper parenting skills,” she says.
Valentine’s Day raises the hackles of aggressive patriarchal males who, because of such aggressive merchandizing and targeting of teenagers, fear that the autonomy and free choice that is a part of such so-called ‘westernized’ ideas, may further loosen their control over women. These males fear that autonomy of young women and men to choose their own life partners will break down the barriers of caste and religion, and that would end their political stranglehold, said Dev Lal, in a discussion held on gender, violence and the rise of Wahabi Hinduism at an NGO recently.
“This year, on February 14, we have taken the ‘One billion rising’ campaign to Gopalganj, where in late December, a village panchayat in Hathua block banned girls from wearing jeans and using mobile phones to prevent them from ‘going astray’. Some 100 village women from Bihar Mahila Samakhya Society (BMSS) will be interacting with panchayat members to bring home the message that such bans are not only unconstitutional but also trample upon the basic rights of women,” said a BMSS member.
Women’s rights are political, there are no two ways about it. Democracy can be strong and vibrant only when the key ingredient, “freedom of choice” can be exercised. And that necessarily means the freedom for a young man or woman to choose his/her life partner, their mode of dressing, their lifestyle, their religion, without coercion, fraud or threat. No matter how silly and commercial the roses, cakes, teddy bears and chocolates may seem, the truth is that these are seen as potent threats to fascists, fundamentalists and fanatics alike. And when there is no logical answer, there’s always violence or at least the threat of it.