Opinion Is the BJP afraid of love? If Delhi’s proposed Shishtachar squad turns out to be “anti-Romeo”, it would seem so

For all that, his ideological successors — the contemporary Sangh — aren’t very fond of love. Or: Certainly not all kinds.

The BJP has established, in fact, an extensive track record for attempting to quash love. Nine BJP-led states have imposed “anti-conversion” laws, sharpening scrutiny on interfaith couples. The central government has unequivocally opposed legalisation of same-sex marriage. The Uniform Civil Code in Uttarakhand has mandated that live-in couples register their relationships (by a process including, reportedly, a No Objection Certificate from a priest).

Latest to join this list is New Delhi police’s “Shistachar Squads” (“etiquette” squads) which, as per their launch circular, will patrol the city to prevent sexual harassment, but which BJP’s Delhi manifesto ahead of the Assembly elections had described as “anti-Romeo” squads. If they bear out to be the latter, a model pioneered in UP, their disciplining gaze will fall less on harassment, and more on young men and women consensually convening in public (Women’s safety has long been a go-to guise for surveillance).

It’s difficult not to wonder now: Why is the BJP so afraid of love? What kinds of love, specifically? What agenda does this paranoia serve?

One convincing answer was penned a century ago, in the 1916 research paper, “Castes in India” by the then-25-year-old Bhimrao Ambedkar. Since caste is held in bloodlines — Brahmins marry Brahmins to birth Brahmins and so on — “caste and endogamy are one and the same thing,” Babasaheb wrote. Caste fundamentally survives, therefore, through the strict policing of romance — a logic that extends to all paradigms of identitarian
“purity”.

At the time of Ambedkar’s writing, the mechanisms of romantic control included early arranged marriages and restrictions on girls and widows. Today, while arranged marriages still dominate, singletons’ social lives cover wider ground. Thus, the need for creative solutions, like tax-funded squads wandering the Capital, slapping park-bench lovers’ wrists. Several of the BJP’s anti-romance initiatives include, also, clauses encouraging mutual surveillance by citizens. We’re now expected, all of us, to tattle on each other’s beating hearts.

Ambedkar doesn’t suggest that only card-carrying casteists are capable of loathing the young and in-love. Rather, his argument helps locate and make explicit the highest-altitude wellspring from which most rivers of normalised “moral policing” flow: Judgement of premarital relationships; restrictions placed on daughters’ movement; the general, overbearing preoccupation — at familial, neighbourhood, and state levels — with one another’s “shishtachar”. These tendencies, in any culture exhibiting them, are downstream from bloodline anxiety which, in turn, is the ultimate expression of identitarian prejudice.

Is this all too cynical? What if it really is about safety? What if the “etiquette” squads truly intend to curb harassment, and surveillance of live-in couples really is, as the state claims, meant to curtail domestic violence?

Under a regime so genuinely concerned for women, Uttar Pradesh’s tactics, far from being emulated, would be re-examined: Gendered violence in the state has risen since their introduction.

In such a state, marital rape would be criminalised, rather than what recently came to pass in Chhattisgarh — a man who sexually brutalised his wife to the point of her death was proclaimed innocent, set free.

The persistent refusal to criminalise marital rape proves, most unambiguously, Ambedkar’s diagnosis: Once a woman is contained in an appropriate marriage, the threat of her womb diffused, her wellbeing ceases to be of national interest. Because women’s safety isn’t a priority; women’s surveillance is. Because unhappy, even lethal marriages aren’t likely to unravel a regime of prejudice. Unfettered love is.

It’s no coincidence that while self-directed romance is repressed, the “love” Savarkar wrote of is now loud — shape-shifting nightly on primetime: It’s a vengeful love some nights, a chest-thumpingly proud love on another; mournful one night, murderous another.

Politics is “a struggle over who has the right to declare themselves as acting out love,” theorist Sara Ahmed writes. And “love,” she notes, is often psychologically useful, purely as a “precondition for hate”. Note, through this lens, that in Savarkar’s Essentials…, Muslim Indians are considered perpetual outsiders, because “their love is divided” between this homeland and Mecca. Is this a case of love justifying hate, or hate manufacturing a mask of love?

Examples of this shadow-light play of a loving-hate and a hateful-love surround us now. Love for cows justifies the murder of neighbours suspected of beef-eating. Love for a Hindu king demands a Mughal tomb be razed. Love for bloodlines — and women’s reproductive servitude — becomes an intolerance for freely chosen love itself.

Rhetoric about the most sublime human potentialities — mutual care, belonging, protection — serve as cover for our darkest capacities: baseless prejudice, envious territorialism, violent othering. The best of who we are — beings capable of love — is weaponised, left corroded, while our least humane capacities grow muscled and bold, patrolling our capital.

The state, with its vociferous, vicious lovingness, feels less like a protector, more like yet another shadowy presence looming too close in public. Morally, literally, and emotionally, perhaps we should hold strong to our own vigilance.

And to stay safe from the counterfeit sentiments around us, a tip: If it’s liberating, it’s love.

Jha is an essayist interested in the politics of the everyday