Love and hate

Love and hate

Money can't buy me love, or so sang the Beatles in the idealistic Sixties and Seventies. Today, everything comes for a price, including the world's oldest emotion, it seems. Ten years ago, hardly any one knew or cared what Valentine's Day was all about. Today, it has been transformed into the biggest sales op for the teenage market with every commercial interest worth the name clambering on to the bandwagon.

They range from the makers of confectionery to the manufacturers of condoms, from the sellers of inflatable heart-shaped balloons to the vendors of greeting cards. In a world of manufactured love, where every gesture is choreographed by MTV, it is easy to be swept off one's feet at the sight of long-stemmed roses, or fall into a swoon at the sight of a fluffy teddy bear. But this, at another level, is airy-fairy nonsense signifying nothing.

To view it as a threat to ``Hindu culture'', as VHP's Acharya Giriraj Kishore seems to, is to sadly devalue Hindu culture. The Acharya, it would appear, haslittle confidence in the resilience of traditions and beliefs that have survived thousands of years of tumult and change. In any case, the Acharya belittles the culture he espouses by pretending to be the sole repository of it. By taking unrelenting, illiberal and obscurantist positions on a range of issues, whether they be the Deepa Mehta film, the Papal visit or Valentine's Day, people like him have seriously undermined the tolerance and pluralism that has always marked the practice of Hinduism in this country.

The Acharya now wants to evolve an ``action plan'' to protect Hindu society against various forms of ``cultural imperialism''. Ironically, what this country really needs is an action plan to protect Indian society from the various forms of cultural fundamentalism unleashed by forces like himself.

It was in Kanpur that the logic of Acharaya Giriraj Kishore's ideology found perfect expression. On Monday, hordes of young lumpens representing the Kanpur University Students' Union and the AkhilBharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, attempted to break up Valentine Day festivities in the city by smashing shop windows and destroying property.

They roughed up young couples, blackened their faces and generally spread fear and pandemonium all around. They did this, they said, to ``maintain the dignity of Indian culture''. They even had the audacity to warn parents that their daughters would be punished if they wore provocative clothes. This kind of behaviour may have been condoned in Taliban's Afghanistan, but it has no place in a country like India, which glories in its democratic traditions.

Since Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Ram Prakash Gupta's law-and-order machinery failed to check this display of misplaced fervour, just as it had when filmmaker Deepa Mehta and her team was hounded out of the state, it may be too much to expect it to take action against these hoodlums. This is where the Prime Minister has to step in. He has to urgently send a cease-and-desist message, couched in the strongest termspossible, to self-appointed policemen of every hue and ensure that those who went on a rampage in Kanpur on Monday face exemplary punishment.