What the different parties positions on 377 reveal

December 19, 2013 09:54

The electoral impact of the controversy over the reinstatement of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code might be small, but the political significance of the positions that parties have taken on the decriminalisation of homosexuality is considerable.

The right of Indian homosexuals to have sex without being jailed for it is so far removed from the ordinary conversations of Indian politics '" corruption, economic modernization, communalism, pandering to 'vote-banks', etc '" that Rajnath Singh can be forgiven for seeing the controversy as a bout of extra-terrestrial angst that resonates mainly with a handful of queers and their deracinated desi fellow-travellers.

The division bench's references to homosexuals as a miniscule minority (so small that Justice Singhvi declared he had never met a gay person) must have given the Bharatiya Janata Party's president heart: at last, a minority so small that it could be coshed without consequences, bashed without blowback.

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