Dear Law Minister Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad,
On 19 December 2017, as a part of the winter session, BJD Minister Pinaki Mishra asked for the amendment of Section 377 when they were discussing obsolete laws. He was very clear when he said that the Delhi High Court judgement of 2009 should be upheld. At present, the Delhi High Court ruling has been over ruled by the Supreme Court ruling of 2013, and it is a crime now to have even consensual sex that is not peno-vaginal. He reiterated that this affects crores of LGBTIQ persons. The Supreme Court had set aside the progressive and historic Delhi High Court judgement by saying that it is not the job of the courts to legislate and it was the job of the legislature to do away with it. You responded to that calmly by saying that this would need a proper consensus. I agree with you on that.
For any law to change, we need proper consensus. But Mr Minister, I seek your intervention in this. You can do better. Just by saying that we need proper consensus, we don’t arrive at a point of consensus. What are you doing to work towards the consensus? That is the question you should be answering. The last time a Member of the Parliament (Shashi Tharoor) tried introducing the bill, he was bullied and humiliated by members of your own party. Forget a discussion, it was dismissed even before it was introduced.
Shashi Tharoor didn’t waste any time in condemning his own party members for their absenteeism.
Following this, even my mother started a petition on change.org demanding that Section 377 should be scrapped. So Mr Minister, this is deeply personal when I ask you, when are you planning to start a series of debates? I urge you to start the discussion right now.
If you dig deep inside your own party, which has maximum people in the Lok Sabha, you will notice that bigotry and homophobia runs deep in the veins of your top ministers. Rajnath Singh thinks homosexuality is an “unnatural act”. The charming Sushma Swaraj who responds on tweets promptly, said that homosexuality is against Indian ethos.
The government has not come out with an official stand on Section 377, we are told. But while Arun Jaitley has come out in support of the Delhi High Court judgement, the above two (Rajnath and Sushma) were clear about their homophobia. The Prime Minister has been silent. And we are left in a state of ambivalence.
I just got off the phone with Koninika Roy from The Humsafar Trust (HST), the organisation that works for the rights of sexual minorities. HST had sent letters to each of the 544 Members of Parliament on Section 377, only to receive response from 5 of them. Organisations like Indian Psychiatric Association, American Psychiatric Association, World Health Organisation have all have stated that homosexuality is not a disease. How much time will it take for the BJP majority Parliament to catch up?
Seriously, the time is ticking, and our patience is dipping. There are lesbian women forced in marriages, there are gay men committing suicide, there are corrective rape techniques, and there are people like Baba Ramdev and Ram Rahim Insaan who make bogus claims that they can cure homosexuals.
Since you are the law minister of our country, I expect you to answer this – when will you achieve a consensus? When would you sit down and discuss Section 377? When will you really catch up with our non-discriminatory cultural roots, because it has always been ‘Indian’ to be accepting of people of different genders and sexualities.
I look up to you with hope and support to push the needle forward. Since this government always claims that it makes change happen, I ask you – when will you work at changing the plight of homosexuals in our country?
Regards,
Harish Iyer
An LGBTIQ citizen of India
(Harish Iyer is an equal rights activist working for the rights of the LGBT community, women, children and animals. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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