On August 6, more than 40 couples who had checked into various hotels in Madh Island and Aksa in Mumbai were met with the kind of treatment at the hands of the police which possibly scarred them for life. The consenting adults, who were inside their rooms, were dragged out to the police station for the crime of ‘public indecency’. All the youngsters were asked to call up their parents. One of the arrested women was reportedly slapped by a female police constable for stating she had broken no law and another told Mid-Day she was contemplating suicide.
The issue has been framed in the media as an act of moral policing. Headlines screaming moral policing are dime a dozen and columns are being written on how youngsters, parents and society must tackle this menace.
There is no doubt that there is a healthy conservative population in the country which firmly believes that premarital sex or any interaction between a male and female before marriage is criminal. There are many who would endorse the police violating the privacy of these couples and the consequent harassment which borders on the criminal.
But when the police indulge in such acts of ‘moral policing’, I suspect it is not just that. In fact, in most such ‘crackdowns’ by the police especially in urban areas, one wonders if it has anything to do with moral policing at all.
Think about it, when the cops decide to take out a raid out against hotels or bars to target couples, they are not thinking “let me reform the society and get rid of its immoral elements”. A constable is more likely to be thinking “this is going to be fun, and hope my cut will be bigger this time”. The same police force which is capable of knocking on the doors of hotel rooms with consenting couples and book them for public indecency are also capable of letting go a sick-minded man who tried to molest a girl in broad day light, and intimidating the girl instead.
The bigger problem is that our police departments are not accountable. Intimidation is their most powerful weapon. Their goal is money, not morality, and intimidation comes in very handy given how defeating our criminal justice system can be.
The moral policing debate, on the back of such state-sponsored ‘acts of terror’ on loving couples, is a smokescreen. The debate helps the police – because while they do later take a step back, deny the supposed act of ‘moral policing’ and say “oops, sorry”, what really happens is that nobody is talking about the real problem, which is their deep-rooted corruption and how drunk they are on formal and informal power. And it is a juicier topic for the media since the moral policing ‘angle’ makes for exciting liberals-conservatives shouting matches, the latter ever-willing to offer the most stupid of judgmental statements.
Police officers are products of the same society we are all a part of and go through the same social conditioning. While there are those who are genuinely morally regressive, many are quite liberal – but all of them are capable of joining hands and raid a hotel and harass couples hoping they would cough up some money.
This is because of the lack of accountability of the police, both real and legal. A discussion paper by the Centre for Law and Policy Research states that “in all cases of police misconduct, it is the State which has been made vicariously liable to pay compensation and not the individual police officers”. Even if it is proved that they were in the wrong, officers get away with it leaving the larger institution of the state liable. It also states that “the procedural safeguard available to police officers is a hurdle while instituting criminal complaints against them”. Addressing these issues, than waiting for the society to change its ‘moral code’ over night, will help citizens live a life with lesser violations.
This is not to say moral policing is not an issue. At the very least it is being used as an excuse by the police and politicians to threaten citizens and so it must be countered publicly. But it must not take our attention away from the real issue which is the unbridled power we have given to our police forces.