Moral policing, a phrase being used to name those groups of people who have assumed self proclaimed responsibilities to improve the cultural and ethnic style of living and also to become our moral guardians. The Mangalore incident and a series of other such incidents show how this phenomenon is becoming prevalent in our country. The guarantees of liberty and freedom of expression as enshrined in our constitution have started to seem meaningless under the black shadows of such actions which now have become a regular on the newspapers of our country.
A typical evening at “Amnesia: The Lounge”, a pub in Mangalore in Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka, turned into a nightmare for a few young women on January 24. As television news grabs later showed, in an incident as bizarre as it could be, they were chased out of the pub and hit brutally by a group of men. Eyewitnesses say that a group of more than 40 people shouting slogans such as “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, “Jai Sri Ram”, “Bajrang Dal ki Jai” and “Sri Rama Sene ki Jai” barged into the pub.