The Politics of Gay Rights in India

Legalizing homosexuality may not be as much of a political stretch as it appears.

 

                           

By

Sadanand Dhume

The Wall Street Journal

July 2, 2015 12:42 p.m. ET

 

When it comes to lesbians, gays, bisexual and transgendered people, last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage highlights the gulf between India and much of the democratic world. More than 150 years after it was introduced, a colonial-era Indian law continues to criminalize “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal.” This effectively makes homosexuality illegal in India, aligning the country closer to Pakistan and Egypt than with the liberal democracies in Asia and the West.

In 2009, the Delhi High Court decriminalized all consensual sex between adults in private, raising hopes among activists that India was finally outgrowing an archaic law restricting individual freedom. But two years ago the Supreme Court overturned the decision and tossed the fate of Section 377, the part of the Indian penal code that criminalizes gay sex, back to Parliament.

Judicial restraint—not practiced nearly enough by India’s hyperactive courts—is not the problem. The principle that social conventions are better challenged by elected legislators than by unelected judges is sound.

Unfortunately, India’s politicians show little inclination to revisit the issue. Liberals within the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party who oppose Section 377 remain a small minority. Those who call for the scrapping of the antiquated law are quickly drowned out by the likes of 75-year-old Subramanian Swamy, who calls homosexuality “a genetic disorder” and publicly likens gays to “handicapped persons.”

To its credit, the opposition Congress Party officially stands for decriminalizing homosexuality. Greeting the 2013 Supreme Court decision with dismay, party president Sonia Gandhi described Section 377 as an “archaic, repressive and unjust law that infringed on the basic human rights enshrined in our constitution.” But even the Congress Party has hardly gone beyond lip service.

By refusing to consider the change, India’s politicians serve their country poorly. The outdated law places India at odds with virtually every major democracy. Even England, upon whose Victorian-era laws India’s penal code is based, decriminalized homosexuality in 1967 and allowed same-sex marriage two years ago. In East Asia, countries whose economic success India seeks to emulate—among them Japan and South Korea—do not outlaw homosexuality. By upholding such an antiquated law, India puts itself in the company of such paragons of human rights such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Somalia.

More importantly, over the past two decades Indian society has rapidly become more accepting regarding sexuality. Many of India’s major cities hold pride parades. Gay characters have begun to appear in mainstream Bollywood films and the occasional television commercial, and discussions of gay rights on talk shows are commonplace enough to barely raise an eyebrow. India’s English-language newspapers greeted the U.S. Supreme Court ruling with a flurry of op-eds and editorials demanding an end to Section 377.

Opposition to homosexuality in India may appear to remain relatively broad, but it doesn’t run particularly deep. Nobody is likely to lose an election because they revoked a law mostly used by crooked cops to shake down gays who lack connections.

According to the Pew Research Center, about 67% of Indians regard homosexuality as morally unacceptable. But this is lower than the 82% of people who feel similarly in the six sub-Saharan African countries surveyed, and the 89% who feel that way in six Muslim-majority Middle Eastern countries. Legalizing homosexuality in India may not be as much of a political stretch as it appears to be.

On the other hand, any political party interested in appealing to a cohort of idealistic and well-educated 20-somethings, including tens of thousands of Indians studying abroad, won’t be hurt by striking the right note on what many people see as a matter of basic human rights. This is something that the three-year-old Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man Party), which won a dramatic state-election victory in Delhi in February, appears to have figured out.

Though some conservative Hindus, such as the yoga guru Baba Ramdev, remain opposed to homosexuality, antigay positions lack deep scriptural sanction in Hinduism. As the writer Devdutt Pattanaik points out, ancient Indian scriptures frowned upon homosexuality but carried no threats of eternal damnation. The kind of organized opposition to gay rights mounted by mosques in the Middle East and sections of the church in Africa does not exist in India. This may explain why Section 377 is rarely invoked. By one estimate, prosecutors have used it only about 200 times since it came into effect in 1861.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi often says the government has no business being in business. It has even less business being in the bedroom. It’s time for India to junk the awful Section 377 and keep up with changes in its own society.

Mr. Dhume is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for WSJ.com.

Disconnection

                                                             

Failure? Or Fortune?

Failure? Or Fortune?.

Failure? Or Fortune?

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Failures gave her a chance to reflect upon her true self, her own identity. It helped her to see the real world through the eyes of the less fortunate ones. The ones who failed and honestly did accept their failures, but were curbed by the higher echelons of the society. Now, the only objective that she had in her mind was to lend a voice to those less fortunate ones, so even they could earn a respectful place, in the society. For this, she was way too much more determined than ever before.

          Not everybody gets a chance to fail so miserably in life. She just got lucky. *wink*

– Suri

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HYANNIS, MASS.

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