There are videos that make you angry, and there are videos that make language feel cheap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Jamui clip belongs to the second kind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What followed was not a warning, not a conversation, not a community\u2019s concern. It was rascality with a camera. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hands that had no right to exist in that space were placed on a child. A boy was slapped and seized. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A girl folded her hands and begged. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pack filmed the humiliation and threatened to put it online if the children complained. That is not culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is not discipline. That is not \u201csociety correcting itself.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is a pack of satans who crossed every limit a civilisation is supposed to keep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not in a conservative society. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not in a liberal society. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not in a village. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not in a city. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A man who uses the excuse of morality to grope a minor has already confessed that morality was never the point. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The law already has a name for this. POCSO is not a slogan. It is the state\u2019s admission that a child is not an exhibit for a mob.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is also the moment to draw a hard line that many people are too frightened, or too fashionable, to draw. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The crime in the video and the social question of underage pairing are not the same sentence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
They must not be welded together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If we weld them, two dishonest things happen at once. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
First, the predators get a costume. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is intellectually lazy and morally cheap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am not with anyone who thinks this is the hour to give a seminar on elegance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When satans have already crossed the last line on camera, the first duty is not to polish a phrase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018Decent manner\u2019 is a conversation for parents\u2019 meetings, school assemblies, coaching institutes and mohalla elders. It is not a caption you paste on a video of a child being groped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yes, the two students were underage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That fact matters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It does not license a mob. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It obliges adults. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Class 10 is not adulthood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s sharpness from strangers on a dark road. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If that is what some people mean when they say \u201cmoral policing,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s safety to luck. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
None of this requires a volunteer army with covered faces. None of this requires a man to decide, in the dark, that another man\u2019s child is his property to inspect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If we refuse that work, two markets fill the vacuum. One is the market of the predator who borrows the vocabulary of morality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both markets are liars. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A society that cannot protect a girl from a mob has failed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A society that cannot tell its own children that childhood has limits has also failed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The answer to both failures is not a new militia. It is adults who do their jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
No complaint reached the police from the children that night. The machine woke when the internet did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The victims were traced from a vehicle number in the clip. An FIR followed under BNS and POCSO. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
An SIT was formed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Arrests came. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
120 social-media accounts were booked for circulating an unblurred video of a minor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is not nothing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cChhitput.\u201d – – Isolated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Individual. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Things happen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s terror were a debating prop. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is not sensitivity. That is a government talking to itself in the mirror.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yesterday\u2019s gunda walked with a party flag that the present rulers love to curse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The surname on the charge-sheet does not clean the road. The alliance in Patna does not clean the road. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A press conference at 4 p.m. does not clean the road. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A government that continues in power by reminding people of Lalu Yadav\u2019s years must be judged by a harsher test than nostalgia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Gunda is not a museum exhibit. He has only changed the slogan he shouts while he works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Congress does not get to discover women\u2019s safety only when a camera is already rolling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pappu Yadav does not get to auction the accused\u2019s party label before the investigation has finished speaking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is not a television panel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A girl was handled like an object. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A boy was beaten for standing near her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fear of the state is the only moral policing a republic is allowed to outsource to uniforms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everything else belongs to the home and the school. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If Bihar\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Teach boys that a classmate is not a trophy and not a target. Teach girls that silence after dusk is not bravery. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Teach coaching centres that they are in loco parentis until the child is handed back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Teach local police that a lonely stretch near a hillock is not \u2018nobody\u2019s land\u2019 after sunset. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Teach ministers that \u2018sporadic\u2019 is a word you use for a pothole, not for a child being dragged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And teach the street this, in the only tone the video deserves: you do not get to appoint yourself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is gunda behaviour. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you do it while the present government is in office, you have made their oldest campaign speech a lie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shreyasi Singh is right that a society can hold standards without becoming a pack. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She is right that the treatment in that video is not tolerable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She is wrong if the sentence about \u2018decent and elegant\u2019 is allowed to float above the scream in the footage, as if the scream were a branding problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is not the week to lecture the public on polish. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A civilization that cannot distinguish a parent from a predator will lose both its children and its mind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jamui has shown the predator. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The road already knows the answer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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