When a bunch of Hindu rightwing thugs stormed a pub in Karnataka and beat up the women in it, their ostensible reason had something to do with “Indian norms”. It is not quite clear whether these norms were being violated by the women drinking alcohol in public or being affirmed by their being beaten up by the men. Perhaps a bit of both. But the violence of the assault on the women and on the men who tried to come to their rescue, together with the verbal abuse hurled at the women, was evidence of the passion with which these norms could be upheld. More than 25 members of the Sri Ram Sena have now been arrested in Karnataka, but the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have distanced itself from the Sri Ram Sena’s zeal, claiming that the outfit was not a member of the sangh parivar. Mangalore’s cosmopolitanism, its religious mix and its urban culture were all against the grain of the conservatism of a BJP-ruled state. In a big city like Mumbai, the bigotry of the Hindu Right, though often in evidence, gets diluted by the magnitude and variety of its citizenry. But it would be easier to bully a smaller city like Mangalore. And everything would depend on what sort of an attitude the state government adopts with regard to such incidents, and the extent to which the state’s law and order machinery can deal with such lawlessness without bowing to partisan pressures.

As with the Shiv Sena’s agitations in Maharashtra almost every year on Valentine’s Day, what such collective eruptions attest to is a violently irrational element at the heart of certain invented traditions that are nevertheless perfectly capable of organizing themselves institutionally. Outfits like the Sri Ram Sena are driven by passions that find their focus on such preoccupations as female virtue or appropriate forms of publicly expressed patriotism, all formulated in terms of a certain idea of India. Women sitting in a pub drinking alcohol violates this idea in a way that civilized, rational and modern minds will find difficult to fathom. Yet, the power of hordes is just as difficult to ignore, and benighted enthusiasms are very often collectively held. The freedom to have fun in a secure, yet liberated, public arena is a fundamental right for women and men in any modern democracy. The State as well as civil society will have to persist in protecting these rights.