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Now the elites have formed a nexus and all want everything. One judge was found guilty by an informal committee of judges and ultimately forced to resign his post-retirement job.
A dentist and his wife were found guilty of murdering their teenage daughter. A film actor was arrested after a singer-actress from the UK charged him with a violent attack. An elderly state governor, with a life-long illustrious record in politics, has had to leave his prestigious job because of an alleged sexual scandal.
The complaints of corruption, rape, sexual harassment and official snooping targeting a woman are keeping the investigative agencies and law courts very busy. As the discourse on scandals gets shriller, the Supreme Court has queered the pitch by restoring the ban on gay sex. In this case, the social consensus is missing.
The conservatives and liberals are fighting a battle on homosexuality. The main ruling party, the Congress, does not favour the reimposition of the ban while the main opposition party, the BJP, is against homosexuality. It is not that the sexual conduct of the Indian male has suddenly acquired a criminal dimension. The conspiracy of silence has ended as some newly empowered women have started sharing their personal experiences of sexual harassment.
Every now and then, a high-profile woman talks about what she has had to face in an office environment. An unprecedented wave of public protests and candle-light vigils followed the gang rape and murder of a year-old physiotherapist in Delhi a year ago. The rape of tribal, low-born or village women had never got that much media attention.
The widely prevalent gender-insensitivity and assertion of male power in a patriarchal society then became a major topic of public discourse and media comments. The popular backlash against the rape and murder of an educated middle-class girl led to more stringent laws and guidelines to ensure the safety of women in homes, offices and public places.
In one case, the court awarded the harshest possible punishment to the guilty. Nothing seems to have served as a deterrent. Several rape cases have been reported since then.
Reports have come in of sexual harassment in the universities and law courts. Women teachers said they avoided going to the male-dominated staff rooms. Some women advocates complained that their male colleagues frequently harassed them on a High Court premises, making lewd remarks, touching them and watching inappropriate video clips on their mobile phones. A university professor, ironically teaching gender justice, was suspended after one of his girl students complained of sexual harassment in his chamber. A few weeks ago, a Delhi University laboratory assistant was driven to self-immolation after her complaint of sexual harassment against the principal went unheeded.
Earlier, a woman personal assistant in another college lodged a complaint against the acting principal for asking her for sexual favours. A year ago, a university girl student died after which it was found that she had been repeatedly raped by an assistant professor. Most universities have not constituted committees to respond to complaints of sexual harassment in the work place. These were recommended as far back as in by the Supreme Court.
A retired woman vice-chancellor of a university recalled that when a woman colleague was raped no one came out in her support. A woman in Mumbai took to social media when the railway police failed to respond to her complaint against some hooligan commuters. Foreign female tourists at times face sexual harassment.
A public service TV ad shows a foreign woman tourist being molested and then rescued by another auto-rickshaw driver who is applauded by a Bollywood actor. A European diplomat says sexual harassment discourages foreign women students from joining Indian universities. Young women from a particular region, studying and working in the national capital form an association in order to feel safe. In the most talked-about case, a crusading editor named Tarun Tejpal faces a charge of rape, as defined in the latest anti-rape laws.
What Mr. Tejpal tried to do to his young female employee in the privacy of the hotel lift in Goa during a festival of ideas has been reported, interpreted and commented on by hundreds of journalists. If private conversations about this episode are included, the number of discussants will go into millions. The extensive media coverage given to the Tejpal case opened the flood gates of complaints. The recent cases of sexual misconduct have two special features. Secondly, not the callow youth with raging hormones but fairly mature men. If it is not sex than it is money that generates scandals.
Here, the official regulatory mechanism is unable to cope with the situation. The delivery of the public services is riddled with bribery.
The nexus of the political and business leaders has been exposed in several sectors including telecom, military equipment and infrastructure. The phenomenal increase in land prices has made a clean government impossible. Millions of people have lost their savings in fraudulent investment schemes. Ministers and bureaucrats have been sent to jail.
The activists organise rallies and undertake fasts to press for new legislative measures to control corruption. The TV debates focus on high-level corruption. With every TV news bulletin, moral outrage shoots up. The self-righteous brigades are proliferating. Noisy moral entrepreneurs target deviants who appear to be threatening the traditional social order.
It may be a religious community, ideological opponents, feminists or young women just enjoying themselves in a beer bar. An inter-caste or a Hindu-Muslim love affair may cause a riot. The anti-corruption rhetoric resonates with the people, including those who readily give bribes and accept undue favours.
Participating in the anti-corruption rallies is one way of assuaging the collective guilt. The current bout of social moral panic is acute since it has occurred in a political season. The security of woman has become an issue in the recent state elections. Some states have witnessed vicious election campaigns and the national elections are to follow in a few months. There will be some shows of synthetic outrage in order to use corruption as a political weapon.
The anti-corruption activists find the politicians in power easy targets and generally spare the corrupt corporate entities. Of course, this social moral panic has had some positive influence on the conduct of the governments, political parties and the corporate sector. So far they have been moving boarding houses five times.
The incident led to Cindy being summoned by the RT Chief, who questioned her about the nature of her relationship with Ray. Listen to the conversation in the SoundCloud file below. Sri Agustine from one of the lesbian, bisexual and transgender LBT organizations in Jakarta said a lot of times persecution of lesbians and transmen happen in private space, mostly their homes.
In many cases, the raids would be initiated by some youths from the local mosque who would pressure their sub-district chiefs and religious leaders to take action against the LGBT people in question, threatening to wreak havoc if their demands were not met. State apparatus like the public order enforcers, police, and even military personnel would then come to pressure the people to move out.
Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. The public concern generated through news reporting on this topic, including a feature in which then-First Lady Nancy Reagan participated in a drug raid, shored up voter support for drug laws that penalized the poor and working classes while ignoring drug use among the middle and upper classes. Moral panic is well known in the sociology of deviance and crime and is related to the labeling theory of deviance. A moral panic is a widespread fear, most often an irrational one, that someone or something is a threat to the values , safety, and interests of a community or society at large. I also consider some research on recent South Australian controversies related to sexuality education in schools. This first sexual moral panic was so successful that, more than 50 years later, the now-elderly women survivors of the mass incarceration of PKI members and sympathisers, many of whom suffered repeated sexual abuse as inmates, are still stigmatised. Sexual Survey.
In Bogor, six lesbian couples who worked at a factory were forced to leave their boarding homes by the local police, who told the women their lives were at stake if they insisted on staying. She cited a case involving a lesbian with masculine gender expression who was living with her partner in North Sumatra. Schools are rife with this kind of abuse, with leaders and top officials on campus often leading the hate campaign and discrimination of the LGBT people.
Some universities threatened to withdraw their scholarships if their beneficiaries were identified as homosexuals.