It was a hysterical hour of the night when I accidentally switched on my televison set and somehow the first thing I saw was Baba Ramdev ejaculating on India TV: “ ye prakriti ke niyam ke virudh hai , pashu me bhi aisi prabritti nahi hoti”. As I followed rest of the discussion (and the repeat telecast next day), I was shocked and pretty much pissed off. The hindu religious guru and self proclaimed healer, who claims to have treated thousands of their diseases for free, the Swami who is supposed to have renounced all the earthly affairs, devoting life to the divine service was whining and complaining against the Indian Supreme Court verdict on Article 377 of IPC - decriminalization of homosexuality.
In a discussion and debate which was more of shouting and cheap slanders, “Baba” Ramdev was totally involved in the legal affairs of the world with all the chauvinism, hostility and wrath that his ultra radical Hindutva could muster.
If calling homosexual relation worse than animal behavior wasn’t enough, he called it a mental disease and told them to see psychiatrists. If one believes the same channel’s figures of 40 lakhs Gays and 25 lakhs Lesbians, India’s 4-10 % population is definitely going nuts! What was annoyingly funny was that the man who claims to be a lifelong virgin (Bramhachari), was claiming that he can “treat and prepare” the homosexuals to have a “naturalized” sex. Wow! Now we have a 21st century virgin Kamdev (the hindu mythological sex God ) to the rescue of mankind.
What was ironic about Ramdev’s claims was that he was going on and on about havoc that the homosexuality will bring on the “family system”, “Social Fabric”, etc. He questioned the LGBT rights activists participating in the discussion : agar aapke maata – pita gays hote to aap kaise paida hote? …but he totally forgot that he also belongs to the section of population that is not making contributions to the “family system” that he so much worries about and that if his parents also belonged to the league he belongs to, he would not have been even thought of.
If Ramdev’s chauvinism wasn’t enough, the channel itself did all it could to create a panic among its audience with flashy questions scrolling on the screen and anchors repeating them at least a dozen times with background scores that would have made my little neice run away as she often does during a bollywood movie climax when the villain is after hero’s life. As soon as Ramdev made his comment, the anchors would start chanting them as if it was some mantra. The queer movement activists and the other guests in the studio, whose names were not shown in the screen and it was too noisy for me to figure out all of their names while they were being addressed, tried to protest against Ramdev’s humiliating remarks that the homosexuals were exhibiting behaviors worse than animals and were polluting the society (samajik vikriti).
An ex- police commissioner V.P.Singhal protested the homosexuality with his own unique understanding. He said, the fact that homosexuals practice anal sex is gross and unnatural because anus is not suitable for penetration since it is filthy with excreta. He very comfortably ignored the fact that anal sex is possible in hetrosexuals as well. Besides, if one is talking about the excretion, vagina excretes as much of a filth in the form of urine and menstrual fluid.
What was most heartbreaking about the comments of those protesting homosexuality was that they refused contextualize the issue beyond Sex. They refused to listen to the arguments being made by the activists that the decriminalization meant recognizing the social and political existence of a group that was forced to suppress its identity ever since the imposition of Victorian Law that the colonizers brought along. It was indeed very regrettable that none of them tried to look at the human side of the issue and accept the fact that an individuals cannot be humiliated and condemned in public for choices they make for themselves, choices that are totally their private affair and has got nothing to do with anybody else.
In their preposterous attempt to force an opinion, the channel ran a news footage which showed that a lesbian couple in Punjab who had recently got married, split within a month of their marriage. I must say whoever was behind the bright idea of playing the footage has some guts to believe that entire world is dumb enough to buy the argument that the only reason you should not have homosexual relationship is because you might break-up within a month….arrrrghhh!!! I wish somebody had told him about Britney’s less than 24 hour matrimonial gig.
Idiocy does not quite end there. “Swami” had a caution to make. He was now extremely agitated as he questioned actor and gay rights activist Sameer Soni, who joined towards the later part of the discussion on phone line : “Having understood the kind of damage it does to the social behavior, should we encourage such behavior (homosexuality)?”
The sarcastic actor and firstly surrendered to Swami’s intellect and then tried to explain him politely that homosexuality is not a behavior that one can imitate or learn from others but the way people are. But Swami was inconsolable. He knew for granted through some divine source (which he did not feel necessary to elaborate upon) that there existed only two kinds of bodies in human as well as in animals and that physical intimacy between the same sex is a mental sickness which has to be treated. Swami says his understanding into the matter is very Scientific. Hmmm! Divine Science. Now there is a real challenge to the WHO report!
Talking about divinity, an activist even requested Swami to respect God’s creation as his will since if they (homosexuals) were in violation of nature God wouldn’t have created them. But Swami was in no mood to give in. He looked as if he was going to declare a divine intervention into the matter, but to their relief Swami choose to threaten them with more earthly challenge from the Supreme Court. In this way, what started as a discussion on the SC verdict ended up into an ugly display of gender insensitivity and intolerance proving once more that inspite of its achievements in economic and technological fields, India is still nurturing a Victorian age feudalistic mindset which are very much a part of its religious, cultural and social institutions as well as its administration.
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