Dubbing the moral policing incident in Kerala involving its activists as “shameful”, the Shiv Sena on Thursday announced the suspension six of its activists who allegedly caned couples sitting along the Marine Drive walkway in Kochi on Wednesday evening.
Taking serious cognisance of misconduct of his party activists, Shiv Sena’s youth wing president Aditya Thackeray said, “The incident in Kochi, Kerala is shameful and unnecessary. The Party will not shield or endorse such acts. The said persons involved in the act in Kochi, have been immediately suspended from the Party membership indefinitely”.
On Wednesday evening, the Shiv Sena activists, carrying a banner “stop love under umbrella”, took out a procession near Marine Drive walkway in Kochi. After abusing the couples sitting along the Marine Drive walkway, the activists threatened the activists with dire consequences if they did not vacate the place.
Some of the agitating activists even went to the extent of caning the couples sitting along Kochi’s Marine Drive walkway. Ironically enough, the incident happened in the presence of policemen and mediapersons.
Within hours after the incident, six Shiv Sainiks were arrested by the police and booked under charges of holding procession without police permission and of causing public nuisance.
The Shiv Sena’s protest in Kochi on Wednesday was akin to the “Kiss of love” protest organised by the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) a few years ago. At that time, the BJYM activists had vandalised a hotel in Kozhikode in protest against “immoral activities” allegedly going on there.
The Sena’s condemnation of Kochi’s incident should be seen in the light of the fact that the party has over the recent years undergone a metamorphosis in terms of its conduct. This is especially so after the advent of Aditya Thackeray as the Sena’s youth wing president in 2010. (It may be recalled that late Sena chief Bal Thackeray had -- at a Dussehra rally held on October 17, 2010 -launched his party’s youth wing “Yuva Sena” and anointed his grandson Aditya Thackeray as its head).
In essence, the Shiv Sena has come a long way from the days when it would obstruct Valentine’s Day celebrations year in Mumbai and elsewhere in the state after year and would protest.
At one stage, the Sainiks had also targeted M F Hussain’s controversial paintings.
So intolerant that it had been to the lesbian themes in films that the Shiv Sainiks had in late 1998 and early 1999, raised a bogey of protest against Deepa Mehta’s “Fire” and disrupted the screening of the film, starring Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das. So much so that the Sena had succeeded in forcing “Fire” out of Mumbai theatres for four months. Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, who himself had then led the campaign against “Fire”, had objected to project the existence of lesbianism between two women of a Hindu family, in the film.