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Journalism of Courage
For over two years now, a public interest petition has been traversing the corridors of the courts asking that Section 377 of the IPC—a century old provision that deems private, consensual same-sex sexual activity between adults “against the order of nature”—be read down. The case has yet to reach its day of legal judgment, even though the various governments of India, past and present, have been busy responding to the petition warning us that giving adult citizens the right to live their lives as they please still counts as a crime against society and social values.
If we are being named as victims, should we not know what is happening in our names? The NDA government said that allowing gay and lesbian people to live lives without feeling like criminals in their own country and giving them the freedom to make their own decisions about how they want to live their lives meets with the “disapproval of much of Indian society” and that this “disapproval is enough to justify criminalisation.” The UPA government has just sadly echoed the same response. What they are saying is that it is all right for hijras not to be given passports, ration cards, or election ID cards, or to be able to get employment. It is all right for the police to be able to harass/sexually abuse hijras and gay men and threaten them with Section 377. It is acceptable for mental health professionals to use electro-shock therapy to try and “cure” gay people of their “disease”, or for the NHRC not to recognise gay rights as human rights.
In our name, therefore, we are saying that there is a class of citizens, who live and work in this country, that do not deserve to have the right to live full lives, fall in love, be physically and emotionally with the people that they choose to love, be free of violence and discrimination, and free of the despised label of “deviant”. Sounds familiar? Let this writer spell it out: this is the same argument that preserves caste, caste, sex, and religious hierarchies in this land. Inter-caste marriages, single women, Dalits, hijras, widows, and sex workers, among many others, have all been called unnatural, abnormal, or deviant at one time or another.
There is a fundamental principle here: we cling to a mythical ideal of an ideal heterosexual family where a manly man marries a feminine woman (of the same caste, religion, class, of course) to have 2.2 children that bear the father’s name and inherit his property, should they be lucky to be male.Those outside this norm is punished. This ideal has justified dowry, sati, martial rape, female foeticide, and legitimises domestic violence. In the case of same sex desiring people, the punishment is imprisonment, for a crime in which there is no victim but this hypothetical ideal of a family.
As a citizen of an ostensibly democratic country, why should you care about gay rights, regardless of your sexual preference? Because this issue is not just about the rights of a minority of Indians, it’s about all our rights.
