There are videos that make you angry, and there are videos that make language feel cheap.
The Jamui clip belongs to the second kind.
A Class 10 girl and a Class 10 boy, friends from coaching, returning after an evening outing near Madwa Pahad, were stopped on a public road.
What followed was not a warning, not a conversation, not a community’s concern. It was rascality with a camera.
Hands that had no right to exist in that space were placed on a child. A boy was slapped and seized.
A girl folded her hands and begged.
The pack filmed the humiliation and threatened to put it online if the children complained. That is not culture.
That is not discipline. That is not “society correcting itself.”
That is a pack of satans who crossed every limit a civilisation is supposed to keep.
Let us say this without a footnote and without a political filter: what is visible in that video has no place in any society that still claims to be human.
Not in a conservative society.
Not in a liberal society.
Not in a village.
Not in a city.
A man who uses the excuse of morality to grope a minor has already confessed that morality was never the point.
The law already has a name for this. POCSO is not a slogan. It is the state’s admission that a child is not an exhibit for a mob.
This is also the moment to draw a hard line that many people are too frightened, or too fashionable, to draw.
The crime in the video and the social question of underage pairing are not the same sentence.
They must not be welded together.
If we weld them, two dishonest things happen at once.
First, the predators get a costume.
Second, every parent, teacher, elder, or neighbour who worries about children wandering after dusk is painted with the same blood as the men who dragged a girl on a road.
That is intellectually lazy and morally cheap.
The video should make a mature person go quiet with rage. It should not make a mature person declare that every attempt to guide the young is the same as molestation.
Jamui MLA & Bihar Minister Shreyasi Singh said moral policing can be done in a more decent and elegant fashion, while calling the way these children were treated intolerable.
I am with her on the first half of that instinct: if a society has standards for its children, those standards cannot be enforced by a street circus.
I am not with anyone who thinks this is the hour to give a seminar on elegance.
When satans have already crossed the last line on camera, the first duty is not to polish a phrase.
The first duty is to say that those hands must face the hardest law available, without delay, without caste arithmetic, without the usual Bihar habit of finding a smaller word for a larger crime.
‘Decent manner’ is a conversation for parents’ meetings, school assemblies, coaching institutes and mohalla elders. It is not a caption you paste on a video of a child being groped.
Yes, the two students were underage.
That fact matters.
It does not license a mob.
It obliges adults.
Class 10 is not adulthood.
A scooter after coaching, a detour to a hillock for photographs, and a return in the fading light is not a private adult romance that the Constitution has blessed and the street must salute.
It is a situation in which parents, teachers and the immediate community still have a duty. That duty is guidance, presence, curfews that are spoken at home, and a culture in which a child is not left to learn the world’s sharpness from strangers on a dark road.
If that is what some people mean when they say “moral policing,” then say it in the only language that does not become a crime: the language of family, school and neighbourhood, not the language of a belt, a slap, a grab and a phone camera.
The decent way is unglamorous. It is a father who knows where his son is after tuition. It is a mother who does not outsource a daughter’s safety to luck.
It is a coaching owner who does not treat the institute as a parking lot for children until 7 p.m. and then wash his hands.
It is a professor or a senior teacher who can still tell a fifteen-year-old, without theatre, that some freedoms arrive with age and that a public hill after dusk is not a classroom in life skills.
It is a community elder who walks a child home instead of surrounding a child. It is a police beat that exists before a video, not after a hashtag.
None of this requires a volunteer army with covered faces. None of this requires a man to decide, in the dark, that another man’s child is his property to inspect.
If we refuse that work, two markets fill the vacuum. One is the market of the predator who borrows the vocabulary of morality.
The other is the market of the commentator who will tell you that any standard for minors is Talibanism, and that a Class 10 boy and girl on a lonely stretch at 7 p.m. is a human right which only bigots notice.
Both markets are liars.
A society that cannot protect a girl from a mob has failed.
A society that cannot tell its own children that childhood has limits has also failed.
The answer to both failures is not a new militia. It is adults who do their jobs.
Now look at the state that was supposed to do the public half of that job. The incident happened on the evening of 19 September.
No complaint reached the police from the children that night. The machine woke when the internet did.
The victims were traced from a vehicle number in the clip. An FIR followed under BNS and POCSO.
An SIT was formed.
Arrests came.
The principal accused named in later reports, Nandan Yadav, was taken after an encounter in which police say he fired and was shot in the leg.
120 social-media accounts were booked for circulating an unblurred video of a minor.
That is not nothing.
It is also not the boast a government should be making, because a state that needs a viral humiliation to discover a crime on its own road is a state that was sleeping on that road.
This is where the old Bihar wound opens again. For twenty years the ruling side has sold one sentence to the voter: the jungle is over, the gunda raj of the Lalu years is a museum piece, the woman can walk, the student can return from coaching, the night is no longer a licence.
Then a child folds her hands on a public road and a pack treats her body as public property, and a section of the ruling establishment reaches for the smallest available vocabulary.
“Chhitput.” – – Isolated.
Individual.
Things happen.
Union minister Rajiv Ranjan Singh said an individual incident should not be used to question the whole law-and-order picture. JD(U) leader Umesh Kushwaha spoke of sporadic events and dragged the conversation back to 2005 as if a child’s terror were a debating prop.
That is not sensitivity. That is a government talking to itself in the mirror.
If men can still do this in the name of moral policing, then Bihar is still under gunda raj. Only the Gundas have changed their visiting cards.
Yesterday’s gunda walked with a party flag that the present rulers love to curse.
Today’s gunda may walk with any flag, or with no flag, or with the cheapest flag of all: the claim that he is saving society while he assaults a child.
The surname on the charge-sheet does not clean the road. The alliance in Patna does not clean the road.
A press conference at 4 p.m. does not clean the road.
A government that continues in power by reminding people of Lalu Yadav’s years must be judged by a harsher test than nostalgia.
If the night still belongs to men who can surround children for twenty minutes, film them, threaten them and walk away until the internet explodes, then the boast has expired.
The Gunda is not a museum exhibit. He has only changed the slogan he shouts while he works.
Do not hide behind the opposition either. The RJD does not get to convert every crime into a caste riddle and walk away from its own history.
The Congress does not get to discover women’s safety only when a camera is already rolling.
Pappu Yadav does not get to auction the accused’s party label before the investigation has finished speaking.
This is not a television panel.
A girl was handled like an object.
A boy was beaten for standing near her.
The first question is not which colour of gamchha the accused wore. The first question is why a public road at 7 p.m. had no fear of the state.
Fear of the state is the only moral policing a republic is allowed to outsource to uniforms.
Everything else belongs to the home and the school.
If Bihar’s rulers want to talk about values, they should talk to families the way a serious society talks: early, repeatedly, without a stick and without a smirk.
Teach boys that a classmate is not a trophy and not a target. Teach girls that silence after dusk is not bravery.
Teach coaching centres that they are in loco parentis until the child is handed back.
Teach local police that a lonely stretch near a hillock is not ‘nobody’s land’ after sunset.
Teach ministers that ‘sporadic’ is a word you use for a pothole, not for a child being dragged.
And teach the street this, in the only tone the video deserves: you do not get to appoint yourself.
You do not get to stop a child, invent a jurisdiction, demand a family tree, slap a boy, put your hands on a girl, and then file your work under culture.
That is gunda behaviour.
If you do it while the present government is in office, you have made their oldest campaign speech a lie.
Shreyasi Singh is right that a society can hold standards without becoming a pack.
She is right that the treatment in that video is not tolerable.
She is wrong if the sentence about ‘decent and elegant’ is allowed to float above the scream in the footage, as if the scream were a branding problem.
This is not the week to lecture the public on polish.
This is the week to put every face in that video through POCSO and the hardest sections that fit, in open court, on a clock the public can see.
After that, and only after that, sit with parents, teachers and neighbourhood adults and build the unfashionable thing India actually needs: guidance that starts at twelve, not a raid that starts at seven.
A civilization that cannot distinguish a parent from a predator will lose both its children and its mind.
Jamui has shown the predator.
The parent, the teacher and the state still have to show up. If they do not, Bihar can keep repeating that the old Gunda Raj is dead.
The road already knows the answer.
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