Category Archives: Debates

Debates, Politics

Divide in higher education in India: Vrijendra

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This guest post has been sent to us by VRIJENDRA, who teaches at a college affiliated to Bombay University

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Of late, higher education in India has been in the news for many reasons. The new HRD Minister Kapil Sibal has been busy drafting new bills and formulating new policies to give a big push to higher education and to open up the higher education sector to foreign universities and their affiliates. In this scenario, two issues have been the major focus:

(a) The need to improve the enrolment ratio from the present, dismal ratio of about 10 percent – that is, only 10 percent of eligible young students enrol in colleges in India – to about 15/20 per cent in the next decade to catch up with the rest of the world in some ways. (Though the official enrolment ratio in India is about 11 per cent, if we go by how many of these students are really learning anything in reasonably well–equipped colleges, my guess is that the ratio will be down to alarmingly low level of about 5 per cent.)  For example, in the US and Europe, the enrolment ratio is more than 60 percent. Even in China, our favourite competitor these days, the ratio is about 19 percent.

(b) The need to urgently improve the quality of higher education in the country to make it more competitive globally and to emerge ‘global knowledge hub’ in the near future.

However, any meaningful discussion on these two issues has to recognize two alarming features of higher education system in the country.

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Bad ideas, Debates, Everyday Life, Government, Language, Politics

On Austerity

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In the 1990s, when I first understood economics, austerity was a word that scared me. It represented a paradigm that I associated with the story of Zambia in the late 1980s. Zambia had one of the more functional public health systems in Africa in the late 70s and early 80s. It then became IMF’s test case for user fees in health care and the rest of the story is familiar one of user fees, loss of access and a systemic worsening of care in an already incredibly poor country. “Austerity” was [and is] in economics of a certain tune, not about economy class travel and eliminating excess photocopying. It was about tightening state expenditure, usually to pay off large scale debts. It was part of Structural Adjustment and the attack on “big” African government, part of the shock transitions of Eastern Europe.

In one of its shades, then, austerity is the slow dismantling of the welfare state. It is not the stance — as the UPA would have you believe — that one takes in some notion of deference to the reality of poverty, it is the cause of some of that poverty in the first place. Every time one government or any other calls for “austerity drives” of any kind, the shadow of this austerity still haunts them. The austerity that causes poverty is also rooted within these calls, though more quietly.

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Bad ideas, Debates, Everyday Life

Breaking Rules: Reflections on Knowledge

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This story of the birth of a new language raises some significant questions for our understanding of how bodies of knowledge are transformed. After the Sandinista revolution in 1979, for the first time in the history of Nicaragua, a huge nation-wide effort was made to educate deaf children. Hundreds of deaf students were enrolled in two schools. They had never been introduced to any of the world’s existing sign language systems, and came to the schools with only the simplest kind of gestural signs they had developed within their families.   Their teachers were new and inexperienced, and found it difficult to communicate with their students, but the students themselves had no problem at all in “talking” to one another. With great rapidity they began to build on the common pool of signs, and a complex new language began to emerge, which has come now to be called Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL).  Some years down the line, an even more interesting development is noticed. As younger children enter the school system, they not only pick up the language their seniors had developed, but they confidently break the existing language rules. They invent new signs and deform old ones, and these new signs that do not obey the old rules filter back into the language, making it more complex, richer and more varied.

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Capitalism, Debates, Empire/ Imperialism, Identities, Law, Movements, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Reading Land and Reform in Pakistan

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A number of activists from the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) in New York have initiated a reading group on South Asia.  The notes below are the first in a series of commentaries following reading discussions that some members of the reading group hope to post on Kafila.  This is an attempt to broaden the discussions and in the process make it a productive dialogue to understand developments in the region and deepen our solidarity.

Reading Land and Reform in Pakistan

— Svati Shah, Prachi Patankar and Ahilan Kadirgamar

“…any strategy to stem the tide of Taliban-Al Qaida led militancy cannot ignore the issue of land rights…. Any reforms that revalue and formally recognize the local management of common property resources, therefore, will elevate the authority of tribal leaders over religious clerics or TAQ militants.”
Haris Gazdar, ‘The Fourth Round, And Why They Fight On: An Essay on the History of Land and Reform in Pakistan’

Given the escalation of a multifaceted war in Pakistan, and given our own commitment to a peace with justice in South Asia, we have started reading and discussing issues of importance in Pakistan and South Asia more broadly.  This inquiry is informed by the alarming and rapidly changing situation in Pakistan, and by an interest in interrogating the category ‘South Asia’ itself.  While all are agreed that the term ‘South Asia’ is indispensable, we wonder how ‘South Asia’ could be used to describe more than a region or a set of places outlined by shared borders. We wonder how we can move beyond the limitations of finding historical unity in South Asia primarily through the lens of British colonialism?  We wonder how we could describe the political unities and potential solidarities of ‘South Asia’ in this moment?  We find it particularly helpful to approach these questions by seeing common issues in the region relating to labour, land and the role of the state in societies in South Asia.  At the same time, we want to move away from the received notions of South Asia, whether they be the statist conceptions of SAARC, South Asia as seen by the US State Department or, for that matter, as a region defined by area studies.

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Debates, Politics, Right watch

Saffron Blunderland – Can the Saffrons bounce back?

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The BJP would bounce back in the near future much on the lines of a Shav (dead body) metamorphosing into Lord Shiva.
Mohan Bhagwat, RSS Supremo talking to media in Delhi

There are rare moments in the trajectory of a modern democracy where one is witness to the apparent implosion, albeit in a slow motion, of a political party. Today, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the principal opposition party in India, which was yearning to reach the citadels of power just a few months back, presents such a spectacle. With two consecutive defeats, in the 2004 and 2009 parliamentary elections, followed by the factional bloodletting which is now reaching its pinnacle, the ‘Party With a Difference’, as it used to describe itself,  presents a pale shadow of its earlier self. It is a sign of the tremendous crisis faced by the party that for the first time in its 29-year old history, the top leadership of its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), recently had to intervene to put the house in order. Apart from newly-appointed RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat, a number of other senior leaders literally landed in the capital to hold consultations with the top brass of the BJP to find a solution to its seemingly intractable problems. The latest news is that BJP President Rajnath Singh and leader of the opposition L K Advani have been ‘persuaded’ to relinquish their posts. A search is on for possible successors.

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Culture, Debates, Government

Yashpal Committee and The Future of Ideas:

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The Yash Pal report argues for autonomy in higher education, both from the state and from private commercial interests.

It is only appropriate that the report of the Yash Pal Committee on higher education is being discussed by the Central  Advisory Board On education ( CABE) before being implemented. The Yash Pal Committee makes a very bold appeal for the revival of the state universities and asks the planners to bridge the huge gap that exists between them and the centrally created universities. One can only hope that the state ministers are not daunted by the report’s call to grant real and substantive autonomy to the centres of higher learning. Such autonomy would effectively mean leaving educational matters to  academics and cessation of interference by the ruling party or ideology of the day, not only in matters like selection of vice-chancellors and faculty  but also curriculum and syllabi.
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Debates, Left watch, Politics, Violence/Conflict

बेलगाम हिंसा और मानवाधिकार आंदोलन का ज़मीर

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1 सितंबर:31 अगस्त की रात पुरुलिया की अयोध्या पहाडियों में नौदुली गाँव में तीस हथियारबंद लोग घुसे , गांववालों को घर से न निकलने का हुक्म पुकार कर सुनाया, फिर वे लतिका हेम्ब्रम के घर में घुसे  जहां वह अपने पति गोपाल के साथ सोई थी. राइफल के कुन्दों से  लतिका को पीटते हुए उन्होने धमकी दी  कि उसे उन्होंने एक साल पहले ही सी.पी.एम. छोड देने को कहा था पर उसने अब तक यह किया नहीं और अगर वह अभी भई यह नहीं करती तो वे उसे जान से मार डालेंगे.  लतिका स्त्री है, ग्राम पंचायत की प्रमुख है, पर उसकी उसके पति के साथ जम कर पिटाई की गई. हवा में गोलियां दागते हुए वे  दस किलोमीटर दूर एक दूसरे गांव जितिंग्लहर पहुंचे और देबिप्रसाद के घर पहुंचे. देबीप्रसाद के मां-बाप इनके पैरों पर गिर पडे और अपने बेटे के प्राणों की भीख मंगने लगे. पर उसे ठोकर मार कर जगाया गया और छाती में दो गोलियां मारी गईं. देबी प्रसाद की मौत हो गई. देबीप्रसाद सी.पी.एम. का सदस्य था.
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Debates, Government, Media politics, Politics

Jailing Journalists: Pradeep Jeganathan

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This is a guest post by PRADEEP JEGANATHAN from Colombo.

The sentencing of J.S. Tissainayagam is deeply distressing.

While I’m neither a attorney, nor conversant with the details of the evidence presented by the prosecution, nor the text of the judgment delivered — and so can not comment on those areas, it seems clear that this judgment and sentence was only possible given the Prevention of Terrorism Act, of 1979. Two features stand out, given the PTA– the narrow bounds allowed for freedom of expression, on certain themes, and the admissibility of a ‘confession’ as ‘evidence,’ which is not allowable under the penal code. Taken together they make for a curtailing of freedom which is telling. There is an appeal pending, I understand, and there may be a possibility of a pardon, if that process is exhausted to no avail.

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Debates, Genders, Law, Politics, Sex

Anand Jon wants to be tried in India – I would too, if I were him

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Fashion designer Anand Jon has been sentenced by a Los Angeles court to 59 years in prison for violent sexual assault on seven young women, some of them under-age. His defence tried to move for a mistrial on the grounds that one of the jurors had contacted Jon’s sister during the trial, but a new trial was not granted by the judge. The concerned juror delivered a “guilty” verdict along with the other 11 jurors in the case.

A month ago, his sister Sanjana had pleaded with the Indian government to extradite him as he would not get a fair trial in the US, being Indian. She claimed then, and did so again after the verdict on September 1, that Jon is a victim of racist discrimination.

Would Anand Jon have been acquitted of such charges in an Indian court? Almost certainly, yes. In a justice system in which alleged rapists are routinely acquitted for “lack of evidence” and proven rapists given a reduced sentence because of their youth and the promising life ahead of them, Sanjana is right to insist that he be tried in an Indian court. In an Indian court, the testimony of women who had willingly gone to his home on the promise of jobs in the fashion business, and then claimed they were raped, would be dismissed out of hand. Especially if the women are white. Gratuitous references to “western women” and their supposed attitudes to sex, pepper judgements and statements by officials on rape in India.

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Debates, Genders, Identities, Movements, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Remembering Rajani and Re-Reading The Broken Palmyrah

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I am posting below a much longer version of an article that is published in Himal Southasian.  The Broken Palmyrah is out of print, but the entire book is on the UTHR(J) website.

Remembering Rajani and Re-Reading The Broken Palmyrah

September this year many will remember Rajani Thiranagama, a feminist, an activist, a Marxist, a scholar, a doctor and a teacher assassinated twenty years ago on September 21st, 1989.  Among the reasons for her assassinations was the publication of that profoundly grounded work, The Broken Palmyrah, which she co-authored with three other academics from the Jaffna University.  While we commemorate the life and work of Rajani at a time when the war has come to an end, in many ways the Palmyrah is still broken.  It is in this context that I return to that inspiring work, which has much to teach us, in particular for those of us belonging to the younger generations of activists after Rajani.  Inspiring, for despite the worst cruelties of war, it carried a message of hope, an analysis of possible ways forward and faith in the resilience of ordinary people. Continue reading Remembering Rajani and Re-Reading The Broken Palmyrah →

Bad ideas, Debates, Ecology/Environment

Editors and Journalists Must Declare Their Assets As Well

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On 15 August, our favourite newspaper, the Indian Express, carried a lead article on the edit page by its editor, Shekhar Gupta. The learned editor tells his readers, in case they are feeling depressed with the drought scenario, to drive down to Punjab – to Shimla, Chandigarh or Amritsar. ‘Just drive out’ he says… don’t fly’.

For then you will like Ali Baba be able to enter the magic cave and lo and behold! you will see ‘Totally lush, bounteous fields of paddy stretch endlessly into the horizon on both sides of the highway.’ And he goes on: ‘So where is the drought? Where are the caked, cracked and dried mud-flats with withered saplings that characterise drought? And mind you, Punjab and Haryana are among the worst hit states this year, notching up a rainfall deficit of 50 to 70 percent…’

Lord’s Own Voice, speaking through its prophet, tells us that why this is so:

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Culture, Debates

यशपाल समिति पर बहस और दिमाग़ों के ताले

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उच्च शिक्षा को लेकर यशपाल की अध्यक्षता में बनी  समिति की रिपोर्ट को लेकर चल रही  बहस से भारत के पढ़े -लिखे समाज के बारे में कुछ दिलचस्प नतीजे निकाले जा सकते हैं. सबसे पहले तो यह, जो कोई नई खोज नही  है कि   यदि आपको इनके राजनीतिक झुकाव का पता है तो आप इनकी प्रतिक्रिया का सहज ही अनुमान कर सकते हैं.  वे बुद्धिजीवी भी, जो अपने आप को राजनीतिक प्रतिबद्धताओं से ऊपर बताते और समझते हैं, इस बीमारी से आजाद नहीं हैं. ऐसा लगता है, प्रतिक्रियाएं तैयार रखी  थीं और उनका उस रिपोर्ट की अंतर्वस्तु से कोई लेना – देना नहीं जिसकी वे बात कर रही हैं.
जो प्रौढ़ हो चुके, यानी जिनके कई प्रकार के स्वार्थ उनके राजनीतिक आग्रहों से बंधे हुए हैं, उनकी बात छोड़ भी दें तो नौजवानों में इस राजनीतिक मताग्रह से दूषित विचारक्रम को देख कर चिंता होती है. नौजवान दिल -दिमाग आजाद होने चाहिए . किसी भी घटना या विचार पर प्रतिक्रिया देते समय उन्हें उसे ठीक-ठीक समझने की कोशिश करनी  चाहिए. दुर्भाग्य से ऐसा होता नहीं दीखता. अगर सिर्फ  शिक्षा से उदाहरण लें तो पांच साल पहले स्कूली शिक्षा के लिए बनाई गयी राष्ट्रीय पाठ्यचर्या पर हुई बहस में इस विचारहीन मताग्रह के अच्छे नमूने मिल जायेंगे. चूंकि उस प्रक्रिया का संचालन एक ऐसा व्यक्ति कर रहा था जिसे वामपंथी नहीं माना जाता, वामपंथी समूहों ने   २००५ की पाठ्यचर्या पर संगठित आक्रमण किया. प्रखर इतिहासकारों और अन्य  क्षेत्र के विद्वानों ने जिस तरह इस दस्तावेज पर हमला किया उससे इसका अहसास हुआ कि इसकी आज़ादी तो कतई नहीं कि आप बने-बनाए वैचारिक दायरों से निकल कर कुछ सोचने -समझने का प्रयास करें.
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Debates, Frontiers, Politics, Right watch, Theory

The Ghost of Jinnah, Advani and Jaswant Singh

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[That the BJP expelled Jaswant Singh for writing a book on Jinnah is hardly surprising, even if it represents really the most rotten part of contemporary India’s political culture from the Right to the Left: intolerance of intellectual differences. What is intriguing is that Jaswant Singh wrote the bookknowing well that this would be the end of his political career; even LK Advani could not survive his praise of Jinnah and even though he came back, he remains a pale shadow of his former self. So Jaswant never really had a chance. I have not yet read the book but have tried to follow those who have. While a more detailed analysis will have to wait, I am posting a piece I had written sometime ago as part of a larger academic paper which deals with Advani’s Jinnah episode and the seductions of secularism. – AN ]

Advani Meets the Ghost of Jinnah
On 5 June 2005, Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former Deputy Prime Minister, Lal Krishna Advani unleashed a storm within his party and its allied organizations of the Hindu Right. On that day, speaking at a function organized by the Karachi Council on Foreign Relations, Economic Affairs and Law (KCFREAL), Advani referred to Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s speech in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947 and described it as ‘a classic exposition of a Secular State’ and Jinnah as a genuine secularist (Advani 2005). In this speech, sections of which Advani read out at length, Jinnah, the founder of the ‘Islamic state of Pakistan’ had said: ‘You are free, you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed; that has nothing to do with the business of the State…You will find that in the course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State’ (Jinnah 2005).

On the previous day, Advani had already fired his first salvo. He had visited the Qaid-e-Azam mausoleum where he made the following entry in the visitor’s book: ‘There are many people who leave an inerasable stamp on history. There are very few who actually create history. Qaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah was one such rare individual.’ And further, recalling Sarojini Naidu, underlined: ‘Sarojini Naidu, a leading luminary of India’s freedom struggle, described him as an ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity. His address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947, is really a classic, a forceful espousal of a secular state…’ (Sarwar 2005, Kapoor 2005). If there was any doubt in anybody’s mind that this was not just a polite entry in a visitor’s book, made in a formalistic way, Advani hastened to clear it in the speech that followed the next day.
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Capitalism, Debates

Virtuous Feedback: Why Google keeps winning

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This is in response to Anu’s comment on my previous post on Google: Search and Destroy.  I started off responding as a comment, but had been planning a follow-up post on the issues she had raised.  Read the first post and her comments here.

Anu’s queries are centred around the stability of Google’s current market dominance  – namely, can a new entrant do to Google what Google appears to be doing to Microsoft? In an industry of constant innovation, what is to say the next big innovation – in search, or in data storage etc – won’t come from somewhere completely unexpected and upend the Google applecart?

These arguments are in essence the arguments that Google has consistently cited – this is not to say that this is problem: these are very good arguments with no clear answers and are the reason that Google is still around in its present form and has not been split into many smaller Googules.

The stability of near-monopolies is actually a very interesting question – one that a lot of MBA classes spend a lot of time over. There might be a bit of jargon in this post, but I think its worth the effort.

On Competition: Despite all the rhetoric about competition making us stronger, the fact is that most businesses hate competition.  The key to successful business is create a market and then erect enough barriers to entry to make life hell for new entrants. The better the barriers, the greater are your profit margins.  So, are there barriers to entry in Google-land – or is it simply a case of being better than everyone?

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Debates, Everyday Life

Cancer I can’t Afford – Erica Rex

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Finding out I had breast cancer came as a shock. But the really rude awakening was learning I’m not middle class anymore.

I found a lump in my breast last March. This wasn’t like the lumps of my youth. Those earlier iterations had been hard as pebbles, painful, nested between my sternum and the base of my breast. They had come and gone with my monthly cycle.  This new lump, a lima bean in size and shape, lay recumbent, a half-inch south of my right nipple, just under the skin. And it didn’t hurt. At all. When I pressed on it, it seemed to dip, as though
bobbing on water.

Click here to read the rest of this article by the marvellous Erica Rex.

Capitalism, Debates

Search and destroy: Google and the online ad market

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Google spokesperson, Adam Kovacevich’s favourite example of a well-researched article on the now-aborted Yahoo-Google deal is “The Plot to Kill Google” that appeared in Wired Magazine in January 2009.  The lengthy article takes great pains to reveal Microsoft’s attempts to scupper “a small deal that it [Google] was convinced would benefit consumers, the two companies and the search-advertising market as a whole” and paints Google a company of well-meaning nerds whose only fault is their inability to schmooze with powerbrokers in Washington.  Towards the end however, one gets the feeling that Google seems to have a robust team of lobbyists itself.  The article is co-written by a member of the New America Foundation – a think-tank chaired by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
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Culture, Debates, Technology

The horror, the horror: India’s new IT act

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An article from last week’s Outlook magazine on the new cyber law makes the following points:

Debates, Everyday Life, Identities, Politics, Sex

Teachers and Academics Against 377

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University teachers, researchers and academics from all over India issued a strong statement in support of the recent Delhi High Court judgement decriminalizing consensual sex among adults and challenged the legitimacy of “religious leaders” to speak for the whole of society.

180 signatories from institutions and universities in Allahabad, Calicut, Peechi, Punalur, Thiruvananthapuram, Kottayam, Sonipat, Goa, Jammu, Nanded, Mumbai, Pune, Pondicherry, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Chennai, Chandigarh, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Guwahati and Shillong endorsed a statement that said:

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Culture, Debates, Sex

धारा 377, यौनिकता और नेहरू – संतानोत्पत्ति से परे

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[अगर आप मोज़िल्ला फायरफ़ॉक्स के ज़रिए नेट देखते हैं तो पढ़ते वक़्‍त फ़ॉंट बढ़ाने के लिए Ctrl + का इस्‍तेमाल करें]

धारा 377 अब स्वेच्छा से यौन संबंध बनाने वाले समलैंगिकों पर लागू नहीं होगी. दिल्ली उच्च न्यायालय के इस निर्णय ने भारतीय समाज की नैतिकता की परिभाषाओं की चूल हिला दी है. फैसला आने के बाद हिन्दू , मुस्लिम और अन्य धार्मिक समूहों के कई नेताओं ने इसे खतरनाक बताया है और इसके खिलाफ उच्चतम न्यायालय तक जाने की धमकी दी है. कुछ तो जा भी चुके हैं। सरकार को भी कहा जा रहा है कि वह इस फैसले को चुनौती दे. अब तक के सरकार के रुख से ऐसा कुछ नहीं लग रहा कि वह इस दबाव के आगे झुकेगी.

फैसला ऐतिहासिक है. इसका सबसे महत्वपूर्ण पहलू यह है कि यह एक विशेष संविधान को स्वीकार करके अपने-आपको एक राष्ट्र-राज्य के रूप में गठित करने वाले जन-समुदाय के रहने-सहने और जीने के तौर-तरीकों को निर्णायक रूप से उसके पहले के सामाजिक आचार-व्यवहार से अलगाता है. यह आकस्मिक नहीं है कि न्यायाधीश ने अपने फैसले के लिए जिन राष्ट्रीय नेताओं के दृष्टिकोण को आधार बनाया , वे हैं जवाहरलाल नेहरू और भीमराव  अम्बेडकर.  नेहरू औपनिवेशिक शासन से मुक्ति के बाद एक नए भारत के लिए आवश्यक  नैतिक और सांस्कृतिक बुनियादी तर्क खोजने की कोशिश कर रहे थे. इस खोज में सब कुछ साफ–साफ दिखाई दे रहा हो, ऐसा नहीं था और हर चीज़ को वे सटीक रूप से व्याख्यायित कर पा रहे हैं, ऐसा उनका दावा भी नहीं था. नेहरू के जिस वक्तव्य को फैसले में उद्धृत किया गया है, उसमें  भी शब्दों की   जादुई ताकत के  उल्लेख करने के साथ यह भी कहा गया है कि वे पूरी तरह से एक नए समाज की सारी आकांक्षाओं को व्यक्त कर पाने में समर्थ नहीं. वे निश्चितता से भिन्न विचार और मूल्यों के एक आभासी लोक की कल्पना करते हैं. राजनेता का विशेष गुण माना जाता है, फैसलाकुन व्यवहार. नेहरू, इसके बावजूद कि एक तानाशाह बन जाने के लिए उनके पास सारी स्थितियां थीं , हमेशा इससे बचते रहे कि चीज़ों को साफ-साफ और  अलग-अलग खाचों में डाल दिया जाए.
Continue reading धारा 377, यौनिकता और नेहरू – संतानोत्पत्ति से परे →

Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Genders

My son Jane: Moira McDonald

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Guest post by MOIRA MCDONALD (Written three years ago).

“I want to be Jane,” repeats my two year old, this time bringing his face very close to mine for special emphasis.  “He has to be Michael. Michael is the boy” says his nearly four year old sister Naomi who is oh-so aware of her budding gender identity.  “Honey, you know in our family, anyone can pretend to be anything.  Someday you may want to pretend to be boy, or a cow for that matter,” I explain. She shrugs agreeing to his choice as long as she can be Mary Poppins.   I wish the contradictions surrounding gender identity were as easily resolved for the other adults in our lives.

Continue reading My son Jane: Moira McDonald →

Culture, Debates, Law, Sex

Why I Feel For B.P. Singhal

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In the aftermath of the Delhi High Court judgement reading down Section 377, the initial euphoria and celebration is now being increasingly met with an equally strong backlash. Some of this has of course come from the religious right of all denominations (Hindu,Muslim, Sikh, Isayi Apas mein sab bhai bhai), the army, politicians, conservative commentators in the press. Underlying much of the oppositions seems to be a sense that somehow the decriminalization of homosexuality is going to turn everyone gay, a sentiment that sounds bizarre to us.

But now that I have been thinking about this I think I am beginning to understand the fear that is articulated in this “homosexuality-as-contagious-virus” position. Because in one sense they are right. In his post Lawrence speaks of the radical politics of impossibility – the change in the law suddenly makes possible a new set of imaginary possibilities that we could not dream of hitherto. And so BP Singhal and Dominic Emmanuel and everyone else who is saying that the presence of the law performs a stellar function against the rise of a virtual army of gay people and must remain on the books, even if, and indeed especially because, it is never used against actual real gay people, have a point. Continue reading Why I Feel For B.P. Singhal →