The Great Betrayal

By R Raj Rao

I’m a terrified man today. Wednesday’s Judgement has suddenly left me feeling bleak and numb. Who knew, in July 2009, that the feeling of vindication triggered by the Delhi High Court's reading down of Section 377 of the IPC, would barely last for four years and five months? Today, one suddenly feels like a criminal all over again, even fearing arrest for the poetry, fiction, drama and nonfiction that one has been writing for the past twenty-five years. For if homosexuality is illegal, what prevents the courts from pronouncing that the representation of it in literature, painting, theatre and film is also illegal? We are back to the times of Oscar Wilde and Ismat Chugtai.
TV reports said that the ruling does not condemn a homosexual orientation per se, but makes the expression of it illegal. This is ridiculous. It imposes a sort of forced celibacy on homosexual people. So while heterosexuals are allowed to not just practice their sexuality, but also misuse it, as the rape epidemic in India of the past one year (as someone called it) shows, homosexuals must court abstinence. They must banish desire from their scheme of things.
Given our population and the percentage of human beings in any society who are bound to be homosexual, whether we like it or not, India has more gay men and women than most parts of the world. What the Judgement will do is drive these people right back into the closet, where they will indulge in risky, secretive and adulterous sexual behaviour, perversely thrilled by the fact that they're committing a sin or a crime. Courts and the laws of the land cannot abolish the principle of pleasure, just as they cannot abolish hunger; it will express itself in one form or other. But the Supreme Court’s ruling is a bit like saying that while people have the right to be hungry, they have no right to food.
Of course, some sections of society are bound to be happy with the Judgement. The hypocritical right wing that was instrumental in filing the appeal in the first place, is, I am told, lighting firecrackers all over the country. To them, clearly, having consensual sex with someone of one’s own gender is wrong, but having forced sex with a person of the opposite gender isn’t! Then there’s the police, the constabulary. The past four years saw them poorer because the extortion money that they earned from homosexuals in parks and washrooms reduced in the light of the 2009 ruling. Now, they can go on the rampage once again, and blackmail men for so much as holding hands in public, not to speak of the gay parties, gay internet sites, and gay support groups (who are doing nobler work than Mother Teresa!) that they can swoop down upon with abandon.
I have lost my faith in the judiciary. I have even lost my respect for it. Somehow, till Tuesday, I intuitively knew that the Judgement would be positive, not negative. Favourable, not unfavourable. I even had a bet with a cynical friend that I have now lost (the bet, not, thankfully, the friend). But now I realise how misplaced my optimism was. When I see the ‘community’ taking to the streets today, and condemning the Judgement, I fear for them. The poor souls can land in jail for no fault of theirs, and no, they will not be given furlough or parole or whatever it’s called. Remember how the writer Arundhati Roy was made to spend a day in jail for adversely commenting on a Supreme Court judgement on the Narmada dam?
As I walk on the streets of my city, I will have to learn to be afraid again. Of the cops. Of the neighbours. Of my friends. Of my students. Of my relations. Of that monster called society.
Today, I feel betrayed.