The “Haya is Life” campaign by the Students’ Islamic Organisation of India (SIO) dresses its anxiety over sexuality in the language of moral concern. It borrows the vocabulary of social critique – objectification, commodification, exploitation – but empties these terms of their structural meaning. What begins as an apparent attack on capitalism’s sexual economy quickly reveals itself as an indictment of sexuality itself. An article in The Companion (SIO’s magazine) decries that “cafeterias hum with talk of dating apps” and that “vulgar jokes and sexualized discussions” dominate student life. The problem, we are told, is that vulgarity has replaced virtue, confidence has been mistaken for corruption, and openness for obscenity. This rhetoric conflates two distinct realities: the commodification of desire by capitalist media and the simple presence of sexuality in social life. In doing so, it disguises moral repression as critique.
The campaign’s discourse performs a crucial substitution. Instead of identifying objectification as a product of male domination and capitalist commodification, it locates the source of degradation in the visibility of sexuality itself. A SIO podcast lays bare what the campaign’s printed rhetoric conceals. One discussant asserts that the intermingling of sexes has reached the greatest point in the history of humanity, lamenting the ordinary gestures of affection – touching, hugging – as signs of moral decay. The decisive moment arrives when he confronts the feminist argument that the problem lies in male mentality, not in women’s dress. His response? “Your dress frames my mentality”.
The phrase drips with self-exposure. Beneath its tone of solemn instruction lies a worldview so primitive it borders on zoological. The man imagines himself a creature of reflex, a body without mediation, a beast who twitches at the sight of skin. The irony is unbearable: the same discourse that invokes divine dignity – Allah breathing a soul into humanity – now insists that man, apparently, remains a hormonally agitated mammal who must be shielded from temptation lest he lose control. Between spirit and animal, he chooses the latter and calls it morality.
This is the real metaphysics of the Haya campaign: a theology of male weakness. The man who utters “your dress frames my mentality” confesses that his capacity for thought, self-mastery, and ethical discernment collapses before a woman’s exposed arm. The claim translates to: I am a being of pure stimulus, incapable of relating to the other except through panic or possession. The supposed moral code becomes a zoological survival mechanism. Since the male psyche, in this fantasy, operates like a dog reacting to a bone, the only solution is to conceal the bone.
The podcast’s moral theorist takes this zoology further when he solemnly announces that shorter clothes increase the necessity of commodification, because women in skirts have to do pedicure and other things for their legs. Beneath the moral seriousness of this pronouncement lies a farce: the entire vision of womanhood is framed through male perception. Just as women are instructed to dress for men’s supposedly uncontrollable instincts, their very self-care becomes reinterpreted as a market display for masculine consumption. This is the male imagination at its most colonial: it cannot fathom a woman who desires herself, who dresses for comfort, curiosity, or simple joy. The idea that a woman might want to feel the breeze on her legs without it being an erotic communiqué to the nearest man does not compute within this moral cosmology. The discussant, unable to imagine feminine autonomy, converts self-care into self-commodification, because for him, the only conceivable audience for a woman’s appearance is men.
Thus, the moralist’s lament over skirts and pedicures is less about culture and more about control. It is a tantrum against the possibility that women might live outside the field of male interpretation. The fear of “vulgarity” is, in truth, the fear of female opacity: the unbearable idea that women might act in ways that do not exist for men at all (maybe the difficulty of grasping this idea stems from these men’s lack of interaction with women, given their tirade against gender intermixing). The Haya campaign’s real panic lies here: the moment a woman dresses, walks, or desires for reasons that cannot be reduced to masculine lust, the entire patriarchal order loses its script.
Yet what disappears in this entire setup is the idea that desire might be something other than lust, something expansive, generative, even intellectual. Desire, when freed from anxiety and control, can become a form of openness to the other, a mode of recognition rather than consumption. The campaign, however, cannot conceive of such erotic intelligence. It imagines only two possibilities: repression or rape. If a woman’s presence does not trigger shame, it must trigger violence. A man who can desire without domination, who can let his longing remain open, uncertain, and unpossessive, this figure has no place in the moral universe of Haya is Life.
Thus the project’s moral ambition collapses into farce. The more it insists on haya as a sign of human elevation, the more it depicts men as creatures in heat who require social fencing. The rhetoric of modesty becomes less about virtue and more about crisis management, a public safety campaign against the unruly male libido. In this grotesque inversion, women’s bodies become instruments for stabilizing the moral order, while men remain spiritually arrested, forever trembling before the sight of the flesh they claim to govern. The campaign’s moral grandeur therefore masks a comic paradox: the very men who proclaim themselves defenders of virtue confess that their moral endurance depends on how much cotton a woman chooses to wear.
The Haya is Life campaign trembles before the possibility of desire liberated from control, of bodies unshackled from the authority of moral custodians. Its theology of male fragility and female concealment thrives on fear, the fear that a society of desiring subjects would unravel the hierarchies that keep both men and women spiritually domesticated. In truth, what this campaign calls haya is submission, and what it calls fahashi or vulgarity is nothing but the first breath of freedom.
Shoaib Kiani names this inversion with unsparing clarity:
- Those who defy the rulers,
- Who ask their brothers for their rightful share,
- Who do not worship their husbands as gods,
- Who dare to ask somewhat difficult questions,
- Who demand the reward for their own labor,
- Who dare to argue with their employers,
- Who claim the right over their own bodies -- they are called shameless.
If modesty now serves as the language of subservience, then the future belongs to the behaya, to those who refuse to carry the burdens of male weakness, who speak when told to stay quiet, who love without apology, and who turn shame itself into the site of rebellion. The true obscenity lies not in the exposure of skin, but in the suppression of freedom. The time demands the courage to be behaya, for only the shameless can rescue life from the moralists who fear it.
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Yanis Iqbal is studying at Aligarh Muslim University. He is the author of the book "Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia" (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024) and has a forthcoming book on Palestine and anti-imperialist political philosophy with Iskra Books
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