When I witnessed moral-policing first hand
So my friend and I are returning to his home in Koramangala, Bangalore in an Uber. Both of us are sitting in the back seat, him on the left, me on the right.
I keep looking outside the right window when all of a sudden our driver swerves to the left sandwiching a couple on a bike towards the footpath. A boy is driving and a dupatta-clad girl is sitting behind with her hands wrapped around his shoulders. In what is a very close shave, they’re pushed to the edge of the footpath and are forced to brake to avoid being rammed in. Then after some glares and stares, our driver pulls out. My friend and I are in shock! Was this road-rage or was this moral policing! We try asking & rebuking our driver but he doesn’t respond and continues driving.
Immediately after, we begin hearing screams of “OYEEE”, we turn around to see the couple now chasing our car yelling at the driver to stop. The driver notices this in his rearview mirror and speeds up. Soon, he seems to have lost those two but then comes a traffic signal when he’s forced to stop. They catch up with him, park their bike perpendicular to our car. The girl gets down, takes her dupatta off, comes to our driver’s door, screams at him, pulls the door open, pulls the key out, asks him to come to the side and walks to the footpath and waits there.
A major pile up begins behind our car as we have been stopped in the middle of the road, right at a signal, plus bystanders enjoy being curious/voyeurs. Now the boy comes, begins screaming at him, threatens to call the cops and asks him to come to the side. By this time, the driver has folded his hands and is begging for mercy. The boy, despite all his anger and aggression, comes to the back seat and tells us calmly “Extremely sorry Sir, but this has to be done”. Not able to decipher their conversations in Kannada, I ask him “What happened? Why did he do this?”, he replies: “Sir, first he tells us he also has daughters and mothers back home. And now he’s saying this girl is like my sister”. That confirms our suspicion that this was moral policing! I tell the boy: “You’re right to complain and call the cops. Just take the car to the side and let’s not block others”. He asks the driver to walk to the footpath, gets the key from the girl and drives the car over to the side.
There is now a huge crowd gathered around the footpath. I ask my friend whether the crowd will support the boy and girl or the driver! Our suspicions tend to lean towards the latter. After some screaming and pleading but no touching/shoving/hitting whatsoever, they allow the driver to go! The crowd too surprisingly seem to support the boy and girl. The driver comes back, begins driving and murmurs in broken Hindi: “Agar abhi mere area mein hote na, toh main dikhata inko”. A few minutes later, we arrive at our destination and he’s mellowed down by now and says: “Sorry Sir” twice, possibly fearing a bad review/complaint from us to Uber. We get off, don’t respond and come home. Then I make a complaint on the Uber App, get calls and mails from them and they tell me they’ve dealt with the matter. I don’t know whether they have or if they have, then how!
But the most amazing thing to me in all of this was how the girl did not get scared of responding to his moral policing, she did not worry about her folks finding out who she was with, both the boy and the girl responded to the driver’s aggression but without physical violence and were still objective enough to not be mad at us, even though we were in the same car and also clearly looked like non-Kannadigas. Also, after their response, the driver got scared and (even if fake) apologized to them.
If only more victims responded like this…
