Big Brotherhood

It turns out that Maharashtra’s avowedly secular Democratic Front government has more in common with Narendra Modi’s government in Gujarat than we suspected. Both governments have revealed a shared distrust, deep and strong, of the citizen’s ability to make his or her own ‘‘moral’’ or personal choices. In Maharashtra, the government successfully shepherded the Bill amending the Bombay Police Act 1951 through the lower house of the state assembly late on Thursday night. It promises to put the legislative impress on the absurd campaign to ban dance bars across the state, championed by state Home Minister R.R. Patil, to rescue the imperilled morals of Mumbaikars. And from Gujarat came a surreptitious government edict — now equally hurriedly relaxed — making it necessary for state-run marriage registration bureaus to insist on parental consent in writing. A horrifyingly illiberal mindset is on show — now in Mumbai, then in Gandhinagar.

The dance bar Bill could mark a tipping point for Mumbai. Those who have loved that city for its throbbing spirit, its unique spaciousness, rightly fear for its future. Is this the beginning of the larger caving-in to a regressive social agenda pushed by a cynical regime flailing about for slogans for the next election? Those morbid fears would appear to be supported by the fact that the Bill was passed unopposed, amid much thumping of desks, in the state assembly on Thursday night. The question in Mumbai now is this: will the people wrest the initiative and fight back this collusive political agenda? Will they tell the bloated and ever-intruding state to mind its business, like providing citizens with an assured power supply, and to leave their morals alone?

What the Modi government attempted through executive fiat in Gujarat was a yet more insidious strike against individual freedoms. By making parental consent a condition of registration of marriage, the government was not just encroaching on the adult’s right to exercise a fundamental individual choice. It was unabashedly throwing state power behind retrograde societal restrictions and taboos on inter-caste and inter-religious marriages. Modern Indians have a special responsibility to resist this creeping illiberalism in any part of the country, in Maharashtra and in Gujarat.