Some Indian women have refused to cave to these moral vigilantes. In response to the 2009 attacks, thousands of angry women from across India mailed pink panties to the offices of the Sri Ram Sena. At the time, one academic described the campaign as “so cool because it refuses to take the fascists seriously. It laughs at them, it insults them and tells them they are not being taken seriously.”

These Hindu nationalists see the changes happening around them—more women are getting educated, juggling their home life with work, choosing to marry for love, watching pornography, or engaging in premarital sex. Even if these changes are sometimes incremental, these groups say India’s moral fiber is being eroded by Western-style permissiveness; a common refrain from these groups is that “Indian culture” and “our roots” are being lost to pubs and public displays of affection. So they target couples holding hands or kissing out in the open. Some conservative politicians have claimed these activities are punishable under the law, and more than one fundamentalist group has gone so far as to declare kissing in public as “un-Indian.” Harassing lovers on Valentine’s day, in other words, is the next logical step.

But over the last two years, the Hindu right’s efforts to crush Valentine’s Day seemed to be waning. In 2016, two far-right Hindu groups said they were instructing their activists to give up the fight, because they’d decided it was “useless” to try to stop couples from making what they described as animal-like public displays of affection. Last year, the op-ed page of India’s main business publication declared the war against Valentine’s Day lost, because the moral vigilantes had seemingly gone quiet. Meanwhile the mass marketing of Valentine’s Day in India continued apace, with teddy bears, flowers, and chocolates appearing in nearly every big store and in ads in newspapers. It seemed that Indian progressives had won.

But progressive activists today warn that far-right Hindu groups, feeling emboldened by current Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s brand of Hindu nationalism, now practice their moral policing 365 days a year. “[It] is no longer just an annual Valentine's Day affair,” Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association, wrote to me, but instead “organized everyday violence against women's autonomy and interfaith relationships.”

Interfaith relationships are a particular sticking point for these groups. Hindu nationalist outfits like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh perpetuate a false notion of the “love jihad”—the false idea that young Muslim men are making Hindu girls fall in love with them to trick them into converting to Islam. Just this week, a Facebook page called “Hindutva Vrata,” or “Hindu talk,” published a list of names of more than 100 interfaith couples and called for violence against them. “Every Hindu lion is urged to track and hunt the boys from this list,” the post read. The page has since been removed by Facebook.