Kamal Ghorui
Young love still gets a shove
Now ‘Love means ever having to say Sorry, I’m underage.’ The cutesy ‘Romeo-Juliet’ clause remains as ill-starred as Shakespeare’s storied lovers. In that play, the kindly nanny was facilitator; our nanny state is spoiler. Centre has spurned Supreme Court’s advice to ‘exempt genuine adolescent relationships from Posco’s harshest provisions’. In a written reply to an LS question, the WCD minister smacked down such a dangerously romantic notion, primly-grimly warning that ‘any dilutions or exceptions would undermine child safety, increase the risk of exploitation, and weaken India’s commitment to the protection of children, especially adolescent girls’. Really?!
Looks like it’s not our Justices, but govt that’s blind. You’d think it would be the other way round. That not judges cloistered in ivory courts, but politicians supposedly with their eyes to the ground would see the abundance of teens genuinely romancing – or trying to without policing and perverts. Yet it was SC that accepted reality, offered TLC to young lovers and didn’t get its knickers in a twist over rising testosterone. Unlike sarkar’s stiff stand.
Official – and plenty unofficial – opinion pronounces that we may gush over US tariff deals and EU FTAs, but sex is different from soybean. That all this romance-shomance is a degenerate Western notion. And has rightly been stamped down in the week leading to that similar anti-national abomination, V-Day.
To WCD mantri Annpurna Devi, girl child and adolescent girls are same-same, and must be subjected to same shame-shame. So, forget your experience-sexperience, and endorse the ‘settled position that individuals below the age of 18 years are not deemed capable of providing informed consent’ or making decisions, whose ‘long-term consequences’ they ‘may not fully comprehend’.
The sub-jaanta-hai text of this smug conclusion is that unlike precocious six-year-old bitiyas, your near-adult beti is a babe in the woods who, knowing nothing about love-shove, will sheepishly succumb to the sweet-talking/offering wolf in uncle-ji clothing. And – chhee chhee – can’t engage intimately with a bona fide boyfriend. Who could as well be your not-yet-18 alpha beta.
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Alec Smart said: “Now Showing ‘The Gun(ning)s of Naravane’.”
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