Navratris have always been something bigger than devotion. Sure, the rituals are there – offerings, prayers, songs honouring the goddess Durga. But it’s also the season when people don their glamour avatars, polish their dance skills, burn through half their wardrobe, and hope someone notices.

Garba, the invariable part of Navratri celebrations, is a nine-night carnival of rhythm and colour where devotion meets flirtation, where men suddenly discover hair gel and women spend weeks perfecting the twirl of a ghagra. Everyone pretends it’s about worship, but the truth is written in the sideways glances – garba is also India’s least-acknowledged dating fair. 

Where else do thousands of young people spend weeks fussing over clothes, perfecting steps, grooming, and then act as though they’ve come only for divine blessings? It’s our traditional, age-old dating app – the desi IRL Tinder.

Every garba circle is promised to be inclusive and a place where everyone can shine. But lately, some of these “universal circles” are looking more like VIP rooms with religious codes, dressing checkpoints, and moral policing.

Take Vadodara. An NRI couple recorded a video at the iconic United Way Garba. A kiss, or rather an affectionate peck, was caught on video and uploaded online. It could have been a cute Instagram moment, the kind of thing that earns a few likes and then gets buried under cat videos. Instead, it detonated. Outrage poured in. Police complaints were filed.

The couple, humiliated and under social pressure, apologised and promptly flew back to Australia. For them, Navratri ended not with dandiya sticks clicking in rhythm, but with the reverberating gong of shame. I wonder if Lord Krishna himself would have been slapped with an FIR for doing some harmless raas-leela?

And then there was the incident in Kota.

Two young Muslim women in Kota bought tickets to the 56 Bhog Garba Event. Everything seemed legit. They paid, they had valid passes. They reached the gate and discovered the “unmentionable” rule: non-Hindus not allowed. That detail, it turns out, was not on their passes. Not declared at the time of purchase. Surprise!

The women made a reel, complaining, “Why sell us passes if you don’t want us inside?”

Their calls to the ticket seller went unanswered. At first, there were no refunds. Eventually, after the video blew up, they got their money back. But the humiliation, the insult, the moment of being told “you are not welcome”, that would stay.

And then there’s a far more cruel incident: The story of 25-year-old student Rinku Vankar. She went to a garba event in Gandhinagar with a friend. There, four women decided Vankar did not belong. Why? Because of her caste. They pulled her by the hair, hurled slurs, and humiliated her. Imagine the absurdity at play here – nine nights meant to honour the eternal goddess reduced to women attacking another woman, declaring her unworthy of the circle. If this is divine, then irony itself must be a deity.

You can pretend this is a slip, a misunderstanding. But this is design. Pre-screening. Religious litmus tests at the door. Caste litmus test inside the pandal. Misogyny, closely monitoring your actions, even if you cleared the aforementioned screenings.

What’s at play here isn’t just prudishness or prejudice; it’s a war on joy. A deliberate suffocation of what makes garba special in the first place, that it’s one of the rare times Indian youth can openly practice the awkward, yet beautiful art of being human. To dance badly until you’re better. To dress up and risk standing out. To hold someone’s hand and realise the world hasn’t ended. To discover attraction, vulnerability, and confidence – all under the cover of culture, music, and community.

And here’s the part that twists the knife: the policing is so often done by young men. Men who, let’s be honest, are not exactly paragons of chastity themselves. Men who, if they had a fraction of charm or courage, would also be out there trying to meet someone with dandiya sticks in hand. Instead, they form mobs, shout down couples, and drag strangers out by force. It’s tragicomic (I wanted to use this word for a long while, thank you bigots!). 

The very energy they’re trying to suppress – love, attraction, sexuality – is the same force that created them in the first place. You’d think they’d show some gratitude.

But no. Instead, desire curdles into resentment. Their frustration becomes surveillance. They don’t get the girl, so they make sure no one else does either. It’s like watching people who can’t swim drain the pool so no one else can enjoy a splash. And so you get mobs of men with smartphones, filming couples to expose them, demanding apologies from strangers, living out their fantasies not through romance but through control. I want to hand them a set of dandiya sticks and say, “Try dancing instead of policing. It burns calories and maybe your bitterness too.”

The result of all this is predictable. Couples retreat. Affection is stifled. Women dress more cautiously. Men act more guardedly. The very space that once promised release becomes a stage for anxiety. The circle shrinks, not just physically but emotionally. And what survives is a ritual hollowed out, colourful on the surface, that is only a husk.

The sad part? This isn’t new. India has always had a love-hate relationship with, well, love. Our mythology is dripping with eroticism and playful transgression – Krishna with the gopis, Shiva and Parvati, stories that make today’s scandals look tame. Yet in the modern arena, we’ve built a culture where kissing at a festival becomes a national crime, and women are beaten for daring to join a dance. We sanctify love in temples, then criminalise it in the streets. 

This contradiction isn’t just hypocrisy, it’s cultural self-harm.

And the damage plunges far deeper than a ruined night. Festivals are where young people learn to grow into themselves. As someone who grew up in a religious orthodox family, I speak from personal experience when it comes to garba. Every garba circle is a rehearsal space: rehearsal for confidence, for connection, for the joy of being exhausted in the bliss of moving in sync with your partner.

When that’s denied, something fundamental is stolen. Women learn that they’re not free to dance or to dress, but that their presence is conditional. Men learn that they cannot be tender and vulnerable, but that their strength is proven by aggression, with a facade of invulnerability. Couples learn not that love is beautiful, but that it’s shameful. Multiply that over years, over generations, and you’ve bred a society allergic to its own humanity.

Imagine putting a check at the door saying “Muslims need not apply,” and then someone checks your religious identity as if it were a card in your wallet, to decide if you’re ‘acceptable’. Or someone coaching a couple not to hold hands because it might “hurt sentiments”, as if those sentiments are more fragile than the hearts that get broken, or never met.

Here’s the kicker, though, policing attraction never actually works. History has a 100 percent failure rate on this experiment. People fall in love anyway. They sneak glances, exchange numbers, meet in secret, kiss in corners. Desire doesn’t evaporate under pressure, it mutates. The more you punish it, the more it finds ways to thrive underground. Always have, always will. The purists aren’t protecting tradition; they’re merely ensuring it becomes irrelevant, stripped of the vitality that keeps culture alive.

So what’s left? A festival that should be joyous excess becomes a sterile ritual. Instead of laughter, there’s suspicion. Instead of connection, there's an apology. Instead of music, there’s the flat beat of a PT drum.

And yet, there’s hope in the irony. Because the very things these moral police fear – attraction, connection, joy, love – are too stubborn to die. You can ban a couple from garba, but you can’t stop them from meeting elsewhere. You can drag a student by the hair, but you can’t erase her presence. You can stop a Muslim woman from entering your garba pandal, but you can’t stop her from dancing. Whether someone likes it or not, garba and colourful lehenga are her tradition too. You can shrink the circle, but eventually someone will step back in, defiantly, and compel it to start spinning again.

Until then, though, the joke’s on us. We have young men who spend more time policing kisses than finding one of their own. We have women dragged out of dance circles in the name of a goddess who, if she were here today, would probably be suing her self-declared protectors for defamation. We have traditions supposedly about joy, weaponised to create shame.

The saddest part of all is not that these things happened. It’s that the victims – like the NRI couple, like Rinku, like young women in Kota – leave not just with bruises or embarrassment but with the memory that the very space meant to embrace them, pushed them out instead.

Garba, at its best, is about expansion – the widening of circles, the embrace of rhythm, a community spinning outward in harmony. The more it’s policed, the smaller it becomes. And unless something shifts, the circle risks collapsing altogether, leaving only the hollow echo of drums and the lingering shame of what was lost.

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