Mushtaq Ul Haq Ahmad
14 February 2026
Every February, as the world paints itself in hues of red and pink to celebrate Valentine’s Day, mobs of self-proclaimed guardians of “Indian culture” emerge from the shadows with batons and banners. Their chosen enemies usually aren’t criminals, corrupt officials, or those poisoning rivers with industrial waste, but young couples buying roses or holding hands in public parks. The pattern has become sadly predictable. What is meant to be a day of affection and joy turns into a day of intimidation and fear.
The rhetoric fuelling this rage is cloaked in moral concern: that Valentine’s Day is alien to Indian culture, that the West is corrupting the youth, that “love” has become a synonym for “lust.” Yet beneath all this shouting lies a disturbing psychological truth: these defenders of morality are themselves terrified of love. They fear the tenderness that refuses to obey, the intimacy that defies control. And so, they strike at what they cannot understand.
When Love Becomes a Target
At its simplest, Valentine’s Day is an occasion to express love and togetherness—hardly a subversive or dangerous act. Yet, right-wing groups treat it as an assault on civilizational purity. Why? Because they fail—or rather, refuse—to distinguish between love and lust. In their framework, every instance of affection is reduced to bodily sin, every display of emotion equated with moral degradation. They cannot comprehend that love can sustain itself as love only that affection need not descend into desire, that tenderness can exist without transgression.
Love, in its highest form, is a selfless act of care. It seeks to give rather than to possess. It is rooted in respect, empathy, and spiritual recognition of the other. But for those blinded by ideological hate, love is too fluid, too liberated, too unpredictable. It cannot be caged by rigid codes of conduct. Thus, they label it corrupt—because it threatens their control over human freedom.
The Hypocrisy of “Cultural Purity”
The irony, however, is as luminous as it is painful. Those who condemn Valentine’s Day as a Western cultural invasion are themselves the most enthusiastic beneficiaries of the West’s conveniences. The same groups that want to “throw out Westernization” spend their days forwarding propaganda through Western-built smartphones, typing out moral sermons on Western-designed apps, and recording acts of violence on Western-made cameras. They broadcast their hatred through platforms created in Silicon Valley while denouncing the West for contaminating Indian youth.
Their hypocrisy, though, runs deeper. They pick the softest targets—flowers, greeting cards, and young lovers while turning a blind eye to the genuine moral crises confronting society. They do not rally against corruption, unemployment, rising pollution, or eroding transparency in governance. They do not take to the streets to demand healthcare or quality education for all. Instead, they save their fury for two people expressing affection in a café or under a tree.
It’s easier, after all, to vandalize a gift shop than to hold a corrupt politician accountable; easier to scare lovers than to demand clean air; easier to moralize about Valentine’s Day than to mobilize for environmental justice.
Violence as Spectacle
What drives this obsession with punishing love? The answer lies in the perverse economics of visibility. Outrage sells. Violence, when packaged as “cultural defense,” becomes a spectacle—something easy to record, share, and monetize. In an age ruled by likes, views, and viral clips, vandalism guarantees attention.
A video clip of vigilantes chasing a couple makes it to every television channel; a social media post about planting trees does not. The distortion is structural: destructive energy gets amplified, while constructive effort remains invisible. This makes moral policing a profitable enterprise in the attention economy—a shortcut to instant notoriety for those who crave relevance but lack substance.
It is not culture they are defending but control. The right-wing vigilante’s mission is not to build a moral society but to perform power—to dictate what others can or cannot do in public spaces. Their violence is a declaration of dominance masquerading as devotion.
Love as a Quiet Rebellion
In such times, choosing to love becomes an act of resistance. To hold someone’s hand in public, to speak gently, to care selflessly—these acts become statements of defiance against the regime of hostility and moral policing. Love does not fight hate with swords or slogans; it disarms it with compassion.
Each Valentine’s Day, when couples continue to smile despite threats, they reaffirm the resilience of the human spirit. Love, unlike hate, renews itself endlessly. It flourishes in spite of oppression. Every bouquet that survives a vigilante’s blow is a declaration that love cannot be legislated out of existence.
Paradoxically, the right-wing’s hostility only strengthens the symbolic power of love. It exposes their deep insecurity, the fear that affection can dissolve hierarchies of caste, religion, and gender. A society that freely loves is a society that cannot be easily divided. And this, more than anything else, terrifies the architects of intolerance.
A Misplaced Sense of Morality
The moral panic around Valentine’s Day might have been less absurd if these self-declared crusaders showed the same energy in confronting the real moral failures of our time. Across cities, garbage piles rot in open drains, child labor persists, forests vanish, and corruption festers in every public institution. Yet the “protectors of culture” remain unmoved. The sight of overflowing sewage does not offend their moral sensibilities; the sight of a couple exchanging chocolates does.
Let’s be candid: the outrage over Valentine’s Day is not about morality. It is about misdirection. It provides a convenient stage to act out aggression, to project virtue while avoiding responsibility. It keeps the public distracted—talking about “Western culture” instead of unemployment, about “youth discipline” instead of state failure. Every year, the same theater repeats itself: temporary censorship of affection to disguise permanent indifference to suffering.
The Myth of a “Polluted” Culture
The claim that Valentine’s celebrations are alien to Indian culture is both historically inaccurate and philosophically shallow. India’s cultural tradition has always been plural, adaptive, and porous. We have absorbed and transformed influences from every civilization that touched our soil. Persian poetry enriched our language, Islamic aesthetics redefined our architecture, and British law shaped our modern institutions. None of this destroyed “Indian culture.” It expanded it.
In truth, the idea of love as sacred and elevating has deep indigenous roots. From Kalidasa’s Abhijnanasakuntalam to the verses of Mir Taqi Mir and Amir Khusrau, from the divine romance of Krishna and Radha to the tender companionship of Laila and Majnu, Indian literature has celebrated love as both earthly and divine. Valentine’s Day, stripped of its commercial packaging, fits comfortably within this moral universe. It is merely another expression of the human need to connect and to care. Those who declare love as alien have simply forgotten their own cultural inheritance. Hatred, not love, is the foreign import—alien to the inclusive soul of India that once sang, “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam,” the world is one family.
Public Affection and Private Hypocrisy
Critics often accuse Valentine’s Day of promoting indecency through public display of affection. But this argument reveals more about their gaze than about the act itself. A smile, a hug, or a shared coffee do not disturb public morality. What they disturb is the manufactured image of a society trapped in fear and conformity.
Real misconduct seldom happens in public; the deepest moral violations—sexual violence, coercion, exploitation—occur behind closed doors. But attacking visible affection is easier than confronting hidden abuse. The result is a peculiar hypocrisy: outrage against love in daylight, indifference to violence in darkness. Ironically, many of those lecturing about “lust” barely question the expanding industries that normalize sexual objectification for profit. They do not march against the commodification of women in advertising or cinema. They confine their rage to couples in parks, not to systems that perpetuate patriarchy.
The West’s Contradictions—and Our Own
To be fair, the Western version of Valentine’s Day has indeed been commodified beyond recognition. Corporations have transformed it into a carnival of consumption, replacing genuine affection with price tags and gift offers. In this commercial circus, love is reduced to a single day of ritual buying—roses, chocolates, jewelry—before the world moves on to its routine indifference.
This Western hedonism, where love becomes merchandise, deserves critique. Yet moral policing is not the answer. If Western consumerism trivializes love by selling it, right-wing extremism desecrates love by punishing it. Both degrade the sanctity of affection in opposite ways—one by commercializing emotion, the other by criminalizing it. The alternative lies in reclaiming love as a moral practice rather than a material event. Love should not be about possessions but presence, not luxury but responsibility.
Love as a Social Virtue
When we expand the idea of love beyond romantic relationships, Valentine’s Day can become something nobler—a reminder of compassion that extends to society itself. Love need not be confined to red balloons or candle-lit dinners; it can manifest as care for the elderly, kindness to strangers, patience with children, or service toward the poor.
Imagine if, instead of attacking couples, right-wing groups organized food drives for the hungry or blood donation camps in hospitals on February 14. Imagine if they cleaned public spaces, planted trees, or served in orphanages in the name of “Bharatiya love.” That would be a true service to culture—love expressed not through control but through community. But such initiatives do not fetch nightly news coverage or trending hashtags. Rage is easier to broadcast than responsibility. And so, Valentine’s Day continues to be hijacked by those who would rather break hearts than mend them.
The Real Threat
Let us make one thing clear: love threatens no religion, no culture, no civilization. All major faiths have survived wars, invasions, and revolutions; they will certainly survive a celebration of affection. What truly endangers religion is not love but hatred—the weaponization of faith for political commerce. Love threatens only those built on venom and division. It undoes their project by creating bonds where they want barriers. Every act of tenderness defies the logic of exclusion. For them, that is intolerable. A society where people connect freely cannot be easily governed through fear.
Love therefore becomes dangerous only to those who thrive on hate. Their violence against Valentine’s Day exposes this secret terror: that if love spreads unchecked, their ideology will wither.
Toward a Constructive Morality
If the right-wing genuinely intends to protect society’s moral fabric, their energies would be better directed toward constructive labor—cleaning drains, rescuing the homeless from winter streets, teaching in rural schools, or volunteering in hospitals. These are the acts that build a nation’s moral core. Love of country, after all, is proven through compassion, not coercion.
But such work is slow, invisible, and thankless. It won’t trend on social media. Violence, by contrast, guarantees momentary glory. Thus, moral vigilance becomes performance art—loud, immediate, and hollow.
Beyond February Fourteenth
The truth is that both extremes—commercial commodification of love and violent suppression of it—miss the point entirely. Love cannot be confined to a single date or deleted by a single mob. Its essence lies in continuity. Every day that we practice empathy, patience, and forgiveness, we honor the same spirit that Valentine’s Day only briefly symbolizes.
To celebrate love one day a year and to ignore compassion the rest is shallow. But to forbid love altogether is catastrophic. A society survives not by punishing affection but by nurturing it in every form: family devotion, friendship, civic duty, spiritual generosity.
Choosing Love in a Time of Hate
We live in an age when hatred shouts, but love whispers. Choosing the latter demands courage. It demands that we resist not just mobs on the street but the cynicism within ourselves that tells us tenderness is futile. The right-wing’s battle against Valentine’s Day is not merely a cultural skirmish—it is a symptom of a wider disease: the normalization of cruelty under the banner of morality.
But love, resilient and rebellious, keeps returning. It reappears in every act of kindness that defies bitterness, in every human touch that mends rather than wounds. Despite censorship, beatings, and bans, it refuses to die. The world does not need more men patrolling parks. It needs more people planting gardens, rebuilding bridges, and holding hands without fear. For all their noise, the moral brigades will fade; love, quiet yet persistent, will remain.
Valentine’s Day, freed from both market and mob, can still teach us a simple truth: civilizations crumble when they forget how to love. And the only revolution worth fighting for is the revolution of tenderness.
M.H.A.Sikander is Writer-Activist based in Srinagar, Kashmir.
First published in www.newageislam.com
