Posted on 02/14/2006 5:26:56 AM PST by Alex Marko
NEW DELHI, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Hardline Hindu groups and radical Muslims burned Valentine's Day greeting cards on Tuesday and held protests across India against celebrating the festival of love, saying it was a Western import that spread immorality.
Saint Valentine's Day has become increasingly popular in India in recent years, a trend led by retailers who do healthy business selling heart-shaped balloons and fluffy teddy bears.
But the growing popularity of the day in officially secular, but mainly Hindu India has also sparked protests which have sometimes turned violent.
On Tuesday, protests were held in the capital New Delhi, some towns in the country's south and the only Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir, where an Islamic insurgency has raged since 1989.
About two dozen women separatists, veiled in black from head to toe, rummaged shops and burnt Valentine's Day cards in Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, witnesses said.
"Valentine's Day spreads immorality among the youth," Asiya Andrabi of the Dukhtaran-e-Milat (Daughters of the Muslim Faith), a group of women separatists, said in a statement.
"We appeal to our children to stay away from this western culture."
In Bangalore, India's technology capital, as well as Hubli town, both located in the southern state of Karnataka, groups of Hindu nationalists burnt a big heart-shaped card.
About 50 Hindu activists wearing holy saffron-coloured scarves held a noisy protest in a popular market near the Delhi University campus, a Reuters photographer said.
They burnt greeting cards which they were carrying and shouted "Down with Valentine's Day". (Additional reporting by Sheikh Mushtaq in SRINAGAR)
all your valentines are belong to us!
<< I'm highly offended by their disrespect for our traditions. They should be more tolerant. We should bomb the hell out of this country. >>
Talking about which taking of offense, has no-one else noted that every Danish flag burned by Islamanazism's death-worshipping false-fureher-following f***ers features a Christian cross?
Evil bastards.
<< India Times: "Love is Here."
Don't tell Gengis.
[Happy V-Day, Bro's]
Egads! For one moment I thought this was Scrappleface!
Among the numerous gods of the Hindu pantheon, Kamadev is the lord of love.
He wields a bow of flowers.
Couples fall in love when struck by his rose-decorated arrows.
India is also the home of the Kamasutra, the most elaborate treatise on lovemaking.
There are numerous folk tales of legendary lovers who kissed death with a promise to meet, or rather mate, in heaven.
These old tales are so lurid they make Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet a pale afterthought.
Indians protesting against Valentine's Day celebrations make one wonder what has happened to the people who once sculpted the passionate love makers on the temple walls at Khajuraho.
That ancient tradition of love died somewhere in the Middle Ages.
No longer was it celebrated in public cultural displays.
Lovers were frowned upon.
Sexual suppression was severe and vehement.
Lovers who came from unequal castes were punished and even occasionally executed.
The tradition of Kamadev was buried and the lessons of the Kamasutra were forgotten - then, a decade ago, Valentine's Day began to make an impression in India.
Recent advent
Before that, hardly anyone celebrated Valentines Day in India.
Purists dubbed it as another decadent influence of the west.
But economic globalisation followed by the emergence of a class of neo-rich brought in a new a culture of fancy dinners and dance clubs, foreign satellite channels and expensive card shops.
Their clientele were the privileged few.
But millions of those who were unable to escape the grind of a meagre life could not be deprived of Valentine's universal gift of love.
Commercial TV channels invented special Valentine shows, dedications of love filled radio programmes and even love letter competitions were organised.
When Indians do something they tend to overdo it.
Weeks before Valentine's Day street Romeos reappear everywhere.
Many of them pretend to enact the Bollywood style boy-meets-girl stories that often degenerate into verbal abuse.
Tough love
Such harassment of women is a widespread problem in many parts of India.
Perhaps to lighten the social guilt it is rather imaginatively described as 'eve teasing'.
This kind of abuse becomes rampant in the days preceding Valentine's Day.
There is simply no escape for those girls uninfected by the love bug.
"It is virtually impossible to get out of your house before you find a love-struck class-fellow waiting for you. And you never know what they will do," said one of the harassed girls.
Sexual crimes are not uncommon in India.
Jilted lovers have strange ways of taking revenge: Verbal abuse, physical assaults, rapes, kidnappings and even throwing of acid and disfiguring a woman for life.
Sociologists have yet to come up with figures, but there is clear evidence that this abuse grows during the Valentine season.
People find ingenious ways to express love.
A few years ago a drunken thug, emulating a Bollywood film hero, arrived on horseback with a gun in his hand.
He fired a shot in the air and declared to the terrified father of the girl he fancied: "The bandit king has not come to destroy your house, but to marry your daughter and to shower prosperity on your house."
This is a beautiful story of feuding religions joining together to oppose the disgusting Western decadence that is Valentine's Day. Perhaps peace in our time isn't so far away after all.
Because it's Yours, not Ours.
It's Western, therefore automatically bad.
It's just wonderful to see Hindus and Muslims in agreement that there is something worth hating.
It almost appears like a display of insecurity about the nature of one's own beliefs, doesn't it?
(Desperately hoping this isn't giving too much information on the for-the-moment girl-friend-less :^(
status. LoL!
Much ado about nothing , really. Both the pro and anti V-day folks are wasting their time. Not that there is anything wrong with V-day if it helps one to get laid....chicks are easy on this particular day/night.....
Post in haste, repent at leisure.
I'm all for eliminating Valentines day. When is it this year?
Dunno about muslims....as a hindu , I got nothing against V-day , as long as I get lucky .....
The Shiv-Sena losers (they lost their last elections) need to learn more of Indian history/culture.
Hindu god Krishna and his lover, Radha.
So *THAT'S* why I didn't get one this year!
Damn.
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