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COMMENTARY
South
Asia
Same-sex South Asia
Azmi and
Das in Fire |
June was a watershed month for homo-sexual
rights in the West. On 10 June, a court in the province of
Ontario, Canada, declared same-sex marriages legal. Since the
federal government has not appealed the decision, Canada in
effect has become the third country in the world, after
Belgium and the Netherlands, to legalise same-sex marriages,
and hundreds of same-sex Canadian cou-ples have already taken
advantage of the ruling. Two weeks later, on 26 June, the US
supreme court struck down laws banning sodomy, which are still
on the books in 13 states, ruling that the state cannot make
“private sexual conduct a crime”. And four days after that,
the British govern-ment made public a plan to give lesbian and
gay couples the same rights as their married hetero-sexual
counterparts.
The homosexual community in South Asia,
especially in India, has been making news as well. On 29 June,
the city of Calcutta hosted the first-ever gay pride march in
the Subcontinent. Though small in the number of participants,
it was an important start, and there are other indications
that the community is making its presence felt. The Indian
Council of Medical Research is debating the adoption of
guidelines that would allow lesbians and single mothers to use
reproductive technology to conceive babies. The BBC reports
that The Boyfriend, a recently-published Indian novel dealing
with love between an openly gay man and a young boy who feels
unable to pursue his homosexual instincts, “has raised hopes
within the country’s largely invisible gay community of the
chances of coming out of the closet”. And in Nepal in May, the
Blue Diamond Society, an NGO working to promote homosexual
rights, held a beauty pageant for homosexuals, lesbians
and bisexuals in Kathmandu’s National Theatre.
These developments notwithstanding, homosexuals
in South Asia are a rather persecuted lot. Even in the big
cities, where conditions have improved over the last couple of
decades, and where there is now some limited semblance of
social life for members of the community, especially for those
who are wealthy and have access to clubs and the Internet –
there are significant hurdles in the path. Homosexuals are
still subject to many forms of discrimination, in particular
housing and employment. In Bombay, “people have been kicked
out after their sexuality was revealed”, says a gay activist
who set up an Internet service called GHAR (Gay Housing
Assistance Resource).
If gay men have a difficult time, the strongly
patriarchal nature of South Asian societies ensures even worse
treatment for lesbians. The oppression and discri-mination
they face has been rationalised on the basis of claims about
gender, culture, tradition, values and morals. One note-worthy
recent instance of anti-lesbian activity was the Shiv Sena’s
campaign to stop screenings of the 1999 film Fire, a work
centred on a lesbian relationship, combined with virulent
attacks against its director Deepa Mehta and the actors who
played its protagonists, Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das.
As in the case of Fire, the growth of religious
extremism and militant move-ments has negatively impacted the
status of gay men and lesbians. Religious national-ists have
often opposed public discussion and artistic displays of or
about the com-munity. The self-appointed bearers of their own
narrow conceptions of what consti-tutes morality, these
movements have tried to deny any historical basis to same-sex
love in South Asia. (Those who mistakenly believe that our
region has no historical tradition of homosexual love should
read Same Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and
History, edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai.) The
Jamaat-e-Islami even recommends capital punishment for those
convicted of same-sex romantic involvement.
Conditions in rural areas are parti-cularly
difficult. The relative anonymity provided by cities and the
social spaces – clubs, parks and so on – are not available in
rural areas. Here again class, caste and gender make a
difference. Gay men among the rural elite, such as those from
landlord families, often use their social positions to engage
in forcible sex with poorer or lower caste males. Such
instances often lead even progressive groups to condemn
homo-sexuality. One should note, however, that such acts are
instances of violent exploit-ation based on social and
economic power tantamount to rape – and are condemnable for
that reason. They do not offer any reason to oppose
homosexuality per se.
What makes all these forms of social
discrimination particularly odious is that gay men and
lesbians lack legal protection in all South Asian countries.
For example, after independence India adopted the British
penal code dating to the 19th century, and few changes have
occurred in the intervening years. Section 377 of the code
relates to homosexuality: “Whoever volun-tarily has carnal
intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or
animal, shall be punished with imprison-ment for life, or with
imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend
to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine”. The situation
in Pakistan is much worse. Apart from civil law derived from
the British penal code, there is also a religious law calling
for up to 100 lashes or death by stoning. In Sri Lanka, sex
between men is punishable by 12 years in jail, while the
existence of lesbianism is not even acknow-ledged in the penal
code. Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal all have similarly
repressive laws on homosexuality.
These laws are not implemented often; ie, there
are not many instances of homo-sexuals actually being
imprisoned for their sexual preferences. But they are
frequently used to harass, blackmail and extort bribes. And
because same-sex love is legally unacceptable, many gay men
and lesbians marry members of the opposite sex – with
consequent deception, frustration and misery for all
concerned.
Thus, the laws, which should be meant to
protect people rather than to discriminate against them,
especially those regarding sexuality, must change. The
scrapping of South Asia’s anti-homosexuality laws is important
– often the law must change before social mores do. Legal
protection is prob-ably the only way that South Asia’s
homo-sexual community can be guaranteed social rights, rights
against exploitation and, importantly, health rights.
– MV Ramana
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