Panic has spread among Muslim traders after Muslim youth allegedly trashed and stripped in Mangalore by self-declared Hindu activists on the grounds that he allegedly misbehaved with his female Hindu colleague in Mangaluru.
The Incident forced traders in coastal Karnataka to think twice before employing female candidates.
Mangalore has groups of self-styled vigilante moral police, belonging to different political and religious segments, who are taking youngsters to task if they find anything objectionable in their behavior.
According to sources, such incidents occur every other week and sometimes within days of each other. Cameras or no cameras, moral policing is routine in this region. People get attacked on roads, in colleges and hotels in and around Mangalore, sometimes for marrying outside their communities, sometimes for just speaking to another person at a bus stop.
Will Muslim traders and entrepreneurs in the communally sensitive districts of coastal Karnataka stop employing Hindu girls in the wake of recent incidents of moral policing?
Well few Muslim traders from Mangaluru and Udupi believe, this could soon be reality, as they don’t want their community youths to become the target of moral policing.
“Our boys are being targeted pointlessly by these self-declared activists. We want the government to interfere in this matter,” said K Ashraf, Chief of United Muslim Organisation (UMO).
However, the UMO denied rumors that, ‘traders will stop employing Hindu girls’. B”ut if incidents of moral policing continue, we will be forced not to employ Hindu girls”, said Ashraf.