Stifling The Rainbow

Whether you are waving trishuls, brooms, an imperious hand or a Supreme Court Verdict before the masses, it is all about control, isn’t it? How can we control minds, lives, body parts, power centres, vote banks? And control those we do not approve of, dislike, or cannot understand or do not give a damn about? Politics in the end is about wielding control over the rest and to exercise power over the others, to play with numbers that actually could be human lives but who the hell cares when the stakes are so high?

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Ultimately, in a country, slowly but surely tilting towards a proudly non secular mandate, religious beliefs will guide politics and law makers. This is just the beginning. Watch how the idea of what the ‘majority’ deems to be appropriate and acceptable will now infect the way we educate our kids, use social media, get married and fall in love.

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In our milieu, riots, rapes, dowry  deaths, female foeticide, child trafficking are normal because they happen all the time. But consensual sex between two people of the same gender? Now that is unthinkable, unnatural and must be criminialised because we afterall live in a society where young people are hounded and killed over love within the same gotras. So the Supreme Court has no power to speak decisively about civil rights but Khap panchayats and Baba Ramdevs and priests and bigots do?
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We cannot manage garbage disposal and traffic in our cities. Our streets are becoming increasingly unsafe. We cannot feed, clothe and house our poor. Or protect wild life. Or rehabilitate street children or victims of natural disasters and man made riots. But we must control what people do in their bedrooms with their body parts because THAT somehow affects the well-being of all.

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I cannot begin to fathom what criminalising the gay community means because I do not know how it feels to never be able to acknowledge your truth, to never be able to hold hands with your partner in public, to get married to the one you love without derision and fear, to live without being targetted just because your sexual orientation is different from the majority of people who somehow can wave a religious, moral, ethical or legal argument in your face and take away your life from you any time they want.

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Being a woman has its issues but I don’t know what it would mean to never have a public relationship just because Article 377 forbade it. How can we pretend that civil liberties are for every Indian citizen when scores of openly and proudly gay men and women and those who cannot proclaim their sexuality are denied the legal, social, personal space and the choice to just be?

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And where does it stop? Will they monitor the Internet tomorrow to see who is having a gay relationship? Will they ban films and books about gay love? Will companies now fire gay employees? And will the regimentation of sexuality become a more intrusive affair with personal choices now somehow becoming a public concern? Not to say that we have ever lived in an open-minded society. Even successful men and women who are gay have rarely spoken about their sexual orientation in India.  Deepa Mehta’s ‘Fire‘ had incited religious fanatics to burn posters and vandalise cinema halls. Actor Ranbir Kapoor recently said before his rumouredly gay host in Koffee With Karan that his parents have no problem with his love life as long as he is dating women and not men!
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Late playwright Chetan Datar’s play Ek Madhavbag was recently translated from Marathi into English and Hindi by actor Mona Ambegaonkar and whenever she enacts this story about a mother who accidentally discovers the gay identity of her son, the audience response in enlightening. The debate about sexual identity is still a gray area in work places, in families, schools and colleges in India. There is little information about or empathy for those who are unlike us and have different bodies or mindsets. We see the world in black and white, in the monochromes of morality when English film director Derek Jarman had said,  “Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law.”
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The Supreme Court just confused respect for human diversity with lawlessness. But as gay activist and politician Harvey Milk once said, “You can’t live on hope alone; but without hope, life is not worth living. So you, and you and you: you got to give them hope; you got to give them hope.”  And so no matter how small our number, those of us who believe that  freedom of choice must not be policed, let us just stand today and speak out in solidarity with those who have lost hope.  And hope that prejudice in the end will be shamed and defeated by free and fearless voices.